Subject: Letters to the Editor:  Living With AIDS Has Societal Costs
Date: Published: 9/20/88 43 lines
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    Letters to the Editor:  
    Living With AIDS
    Has Societal Costs

    Re your Sept. 2 page-one story "Living With AIDS":  True,
 we won't get AIDS from Adrian Kellard, the AIDS patient,
 artist and part-time salad maker.  AIDS cannot be transmitted
 through food preparation.  But what about Giardia, salmonella
 or other enteric pathogens endemic in the homosexual
 community?  
    It is a probability that an AIDS patient carries one or
 several of these organisms, and therefore should not be
 handling food, especially food prepared for raw consumption.
 AIDS, through suppression of the immune system, essentially
 converts carriers into incubators for tuberculosis and a host
 of opportunistic organisms.  Most, unlike AIDS, can be
 transmitted casually.
    True, median survival for AIDS has increased from 10 to 15
 months, but at what cost?  Why not measure gained years of
 life expectancy per research and health-care dollars spent?  
 It is certain that far greater gains could have been made
 against other diseases -- unavoidable diseases -- that have
 recently been underfunded as a result of the AIDS crisis.
    As we develop more sophisticated and expensive
 medications, AZT will be remembered as a bargain.  Where do we
 draw the line?  Are we, as a society, prepared (or able) to
 spend $8,000 a week, or a day, as biotechnology produces ever
 more costly results of ever more costly research?  
    I find it ironic that socio-dramas of "life with AIDS" are
 played in the schools, where prayer and, in some states, the
 Pledge of Allegiance are forbidden.
    Eric Stephen Berger M. D. 
    Medical Director, American Council on Science and Health
    New York

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the 
personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the 
hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering 
from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]