Candid Report on AIDS

The second annual report of the Mayor’s Special Task Force on AIDS is an excellent summation of where San Diego County stands in providing care for victims of the dread disease. In clear, dispassionate language, the task force details the number of people who have been ravaged by acquired immune deficiency syndrome and what governmental and volunteer groups are doing to assist them.

These are some of the bare facts that, taken together, show that an estimated 20,000 people in San Diego County in some way have been touched by AIDS since 1981: In the last year, 169 patients have been diagnosed with AIDS, 95% of them gay or bisexual men. Three cases were related to blood transfusions; three were women with histories of multiple sexual exposures and intravenous drug abuse. The only pediatric case was an 11-year-old girl with a blood disease requiring multiple transfusions. Most patients required several hospitalizations, ranging from three to 15 days. The average number of patients in the AIDS ward at the UC San Diego Medical Center was four at the beginning of the year, six in recent months. At times there were 10 or more. As of September, 42 AIDS patients had died in 1985, bringing the five-year total to 107.

Also coming through in the report is a lack of any sense of urgency in local government’s response to the AIDS epidemic. A reader gains deeper respect for those who treat AIDS patients and for those at the AIDS Project and elsewhere who are using extremely limited resources to help victims and educate those in high-risk groups. They simply don’t have the funds they need.

Already, UCSD Medical Center is questioning whether it can continue as the primary hospital for AIDS patients if it does not begin to receive adequate compensation for the high level of care they require. Using acute-care beds for AIDS patients will become even more of a problem in the next few years, when estimates are that roughly three times as many isolation beds will be needed.

The AIDS Project, with a large and dedicated group of volunteers and a budget of only $100,000, is doing an excellent job of providing education in the gay community and support for AIDS victims. But it still needs a permanent facility.

The task force has made several reasonable proposals, including that it be given a staff and operating budget and that it be sponsored jointly by the county and city. As difficult as it is to find money for new programs these days, this should be done. Another vitally important recommendation is the establishment of a task force subcommittee to develop a long-term plan to meet the AIDS crisis. Among that subcommittee’s duties would be developing a plan for extended care facilities, so that acute-care beds now occupied by homeless and terminally ill AIDS patients could be freed.

The Board of Supervisors is set to hold a workshop on AIDS Dec. 10. The board should begin then to treat this situation like the crisis it is, and together with the City Council make 1986 the year the challenges of this damnable problem are met.