Aids Raising Many Difficult Questions

Ocean County Observer,

February 21, 1983

AIDS is an acronym for Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome.

It first surfaced in nurseries where undernourished children were prone to infections that well-nourished children would toss off with a shrug. Chief among the culprits was an entity known as Pneumocystis Carinii thought to be a protozoa, a unicellular amoeba-like organism that would get into the lungs and cause pneumonia. AIDS was almost a medical curiosity until the age of chemotherapy. The purpose of chemotherapy is to destroy cancer cells, but an unfavorable side-effect is that it depresses the immune system. The immune system is quite remarkable. It consists of cells and chemicals that are able to recognize “self” and leave it alone, as well as recognize “not self” that is a different substance than self, and send an immune phalanx out to destroy it.

Thus chemotherapy became useful in organ transplantation and finally made it possible. But victims of cancer given chemotherapy as well as those purposefully immuno-depressed in order to receive organ transplants are equally subject to AIDS. AIDS makes the victim susceptible not only to Pneumocystis Carinii but also to accompanying organisms that might not otherwise be harmful to an adult. Without the assistance of a healthy immune system antibodies often are helpless. The mortality rate in AIDS is more than 30% in the near term, and the long term mortality has not been calculated. The mortality rate for the worst small pox epidemic was only 25%, with no predictable long term mortality. When it was over it was over. With AIDS however, nobody knows when it is over.

What makes AIDS scary now, of course is the fact that it has surfaced amongst promiscuous homosexual males, and what makes it more scary is that it is apparently transmissible not only by direct contact but by body substances such as blood. Thus blood transfused from a victim of AIDS may contain a substance that will make the recipient an AIDS victim – that is, susceptible to these unusual infections. It’s like a time bomb sitting in the blood bank that will go off only after it has been transfused into an innocent victim. Blood banks may find it difficult to require that donors divulge their sexual habits and preferences.

To date a number of hemophiliac children have died from AIDS having been transfused with clotting factors that contained the transmissible AIDS agent.

In my entire medical experience I believe I have seen only two cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma and these were in the elderly. This is a fatal lymphoma that starts as a lump under the skin. Now the disease is running rampant in homosexuals in their twenties. If nothing else this should indicate strongly that Kaposi’s sarcoma is transmitted by a virus-like particle.

The mystery surrounding this tragedy must call to mind the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot and his family were spared under the injunction that once having left the cities they were not to look back. The cities were reduced to rubble by fire and brimstone. Lot’s wife disobeyed God’s edict and turned to witness the catastrophe. She herself was converted to a pillar of salt. After which, Lot’s two daughters, noting the dearth of men, decided that they would have to carry Lot’s seed, for no other was available. They contrived to get him drunk and stayed with him in turn, each eventually bearing a son; one Moab who gave rise to the Moabites, and the other Benammi who gave rise to the Ammons, descendants of whom populate the middle east today.

This story has no moral. It is neither parable nor passion play. But it is striking that a disease emanating from the bazaars of the outcasts should afflict the untainted; that like Lot’s wife the onlookers are stricken; and that if in today’s world the wages of sin are death, the wages of death are innocents.