Medicine: Special Report: Good and Bad News About AIDS

The barrage of scary rhetoric and hyperbole began not long after young homosexual men started dying by the thousands in the early 1980s. Dire warnings of an AIDS apocalypse came not only from headline writers but also, uncharacteristically, from scientists and health specialists. Declared one: "We have not seen anything of this magnitude that we can't control except nuclear bombs." In 1987 Otis Bowen, then Secretary of Health and Human Services, said AIDS would make black death -- the bubonic plague that wiped out as much as a third of Europe's population in the Middle Ages -- "pale by comparison." In a frightening, controversial book, sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson contended that toilet seats could transmit the AIDS virus and that the deadly disease would run rampant among heterosexuals.

The public understandably became terrified and overreacted. Children with AIDS from Queens to Kokomo were barred from attending school. Police officers donned rubber gloves when apprehending drug abusers thought to be infected with the AIDS virus. Churchgoers declined the Communion wine they had once quaffed from their common cups. Everything from Florida's mosquitoes to food touched by gay waiters was suspected of carrying the virus.

Now, eight years into the epidemic, it is increasingly clear that much of the panic and scaremongering was not justified. AIDS is not the black death, and never will be. Unlike the plague or the common cold, AIDS is not easily spread. The virus is transmitted only through blood and sexual intercourse. No one has been found to get the virus from saliva, tears or toilet seats. As a result of education about AIDS and changes in sex habits, the rate of new infections has sharply dropped in some gay communities. And while the virus can sometimes be transmitted in heterosexual intercourse, the evidence does not indicate that AIDS is about to break out in a big way into the mainstream population.

Nonetheless, there is ample cause for concern. Unlike many other diseases, AIDS remains fatal; there is no known cure. It is still spreading rapidly among intravenous drug abusers. They pass along the virus to those who share needles with them or to sexual partners, both male and female. Women who are part of the drug scene often transmit the virus to their unborn children, almost surely dooming them to an early death. Some researchers fear that AIDS could eventually spread, through heterosexual intercourse, from addicts to the population at large. But so far the epidemic has confined itself, for the most part, to gay communities, to the drug cultures of inner cities, and to hemophiliacs and others who have received tainted blood products and transfusions.

While most people can guard against the AIDS virus, the disease has undeniably created a disaster of monumental and mounting proportions. Up to 1.4 million Americans, and perhaps 10 million people worldwide, are already infected with the AIDS virus. Since the virus may lie dormant in the body for years before causing the disease, the number of AIDS cases -- and the death toll -- will continue rising for years.