Subject: AIDS Testing Proposal Stirs Debate On Right to Privacy
Date: Published: 2/25/87 80 lines
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

   AIDS Testing Proposal Stirs Debate
   On Effectiveness and Right to Privacy
    ---
   By Marilyn Chase
   Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

   ATLANTA -- The U. S. Centers for Disease Control opened
public debate here on its proposed expansion of the AIDS
blood test but found consensus elusive.
   The proposal would require the test for anyone admitted to
the hospital, seeking a marriage license, or treated at
venereal disease or drug-withdrawal clinics.  Such an
expansion would significantly increase the test's use
nationwide.  For example, more than 37 million hospital
admissions were logged in 1984 alone.
   "We meet here today to defeat a common enemy," said James
Mason, director of the centers.  "The enemy isn't me, it isn't
public health, nor is it those who are concerned with civil
liberties."  He was referring to acquired immune deficiency
syndrome, which so far has attacked more than 30,000 people
in the U. S., almost 18,000 of whom have succumbed to the
disease.  The virus that causes AIDS is believed to infect an
additional 1.5 million otherwise healthy people or one in
every 160 Americans.
   But Dr. Mason's words did little to comfort homosexual
groups fearing wholesale loss of civil rights, jobs and
insurance as a result of more-widespread testing.  One such
group appeared at the meeting dressed in concentration camp
uniforms emblazoned with pink triangles, the symbols worn by
gay detainees in Nazi Germany.  Nor did Dr. Mason's words
quell the calls for quarantine of infected people by
supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, the conservative ideologue.
   The centers chief said expanded testing would enable
public health officials to better track and prevent the
disease's spread, modify high-risk behavior on the part of
the public and identify sexual partners of people with the
sex- and needle-borne disease for counseling.  Since the virus
first appeared, homosexual men, along with intravenous drug
users, have been the groups most at risk of getting the
disease.  But AIDS is spreading among heterosexuals as well.
   Theodore Eickhoff, professor of medicine at the University
of Colorado, Denver, said that testing all patients admitted
to hospitals "would be to little avail" since many hospital
inpatients are elderly.  But he then proposed that physicians
be given broad license to use the AIDS test for diagnostic
purposes without patient consent.
   "I was startled ...  startled isn't the word," reacted
Alvin Novick, a biology professor at Yale University.  He
warned that forced testing, such as contemplated by the
centers, would drive homosexuals underground and away from
cooperation with public health programs.  "Rational people
won't cooperate in ruining their own lives," he said.
   Nan D. Hunter, staff attorney for the American Civil
Liberties Union, said some expanded testing probably was
inevitable, but she urged enactment of laws girding civil and
confidentiality rights of the infected and ill.
   Consensus also eluded obstetricians and pediatricians on
the issue of prenatal tests.  Infected pregnant women stand a
25% to 50% chance of passing the virus to their newborns, and
may themselves suffer more rapid deterioration because of
active AIDS, said Howard Minkoff, professor of obstetrics at
Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York,
in Brooklyn.  Even so, pro-life groups leafletted the
conference with fliers reading "pro-test means pro-abortion."
   Ronald Bayer of Hastings Center, an ethicist, opposed
mandatory pre-marital and hospital testing as "a maneuver
toward universal compulsory testing."  But he urged vigorous
efforts to notify unknowing sexual partners of AIDS victims.
"The right to privacy doesn't include the right to inflict
harm," he said.

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