AIDS Victims, Discrimination

Your editorial (June 26), “Unfairness on AIDS,” is right on target. The Justice Department acted unwisely by setting itself above the government’s health authorities, thus opening the door to senseless discrimination against AIDS victims. If our lawyers are now allowed to practice medicine, the health of the whole nation will be at risk.

Californians could end up at the bottom of the heap because some of our politicians here have also entered the medical profession and prescribed an initiative to cure acquired immune deficiency syndrome by punitive measures against its victims and anyone else who is suspected of having the AIDS virus. You wisely urge defeat of this measure, which appears to have qualified for this November’s election.

These politicos turned physicians are telling us that they know more about how the AIDS virus is spread than all the physicians of the international community who have been laboring around the clock to conquer it. Their prescription is a mixture of ingredients--ignorance, fear and hate--and all of these are wasting elements. Indeed, the tragedy of this AIDS initiative is the waste. Both ways (yea or nay) we lose. Millions of dollars that will be spent by each side in the coming months might have gone for research to help find a cure or a vaccine to stop the spread of the virus.

JAMES V. MINK

Los Angeles