Prop. 64 Would Hurt AIDS Studies, Researchers Warn

Proposition 64, the AIDS initiative on the November ballot sponsored by followers of political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche, will have “disastrous” effects on research against the deadly disease, a panel of leading AIDS researchers said Tuesday.

The researchers, who rely on volunteers for most of their studies, said fear that the initiative will pass is already making some of their patients reluctant to participate in acquired immune deficiency syndrome studies.

At a press conference called by the California Medical Assn., which opposes the measure, the researchers cited specific problems its passage might cause.

For example, Dr. Mervyn Silverman, chairman of the association’s AIDS task force, said it would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, to have developed a vaccine in the 1970s against the Hepatitis B virus, if such a measure had been law.

The Hepatitis B virus, which causes liver inflammation, is transmitted through the blood and by sexual contact, as is the AIDS virus. Thousands of men from the San Francisco area volunteered to take part in studies that were crucial to developing the vaccine, Silverman said.

Under Proposition 64, which could force the state to collect the names of anyone who tests positive for AIDS antibodies, “patients fear they will be listed and quarantined,” said Dr. Donald Abrams of San Francisco General Hospital. “One of my patients is buying property in the country under a fictitious name.”

Dr. Warren Winkelstein, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley, explained that blood tests for antibodies to the AIDS virus are an essential part of research on the transmission of the disease and potential drugs and vaccines. Fears that such information would become known will “have a disastrous effect not only on our research study but on all research studies on AIDS,” he said

Also on the panel was Dr. Myron Essex of the Harvard University School of Public Health, who was named Monday as a winner of a prestigious Albert Lasker Medical Research Award. Essex expressed “grave concerns” that passage of the AIDS initiative would result in “even more drastic action” in other states with “less sophistication than California.”

In a rare appearance on local television in Los Angeles, LaRouche said Tuesday that Proposition 64 would force scientists and doctors to recognize his disputed view of AIDS.

“What it does, it breaks the cover-up,” LaRouche told interviewer Michael Jackson on KCBS-TV. “The cover-up of the fact that AIDS can be transmitted (through the air), by mosquitoes and in other ways. It is not a sexual disease.”

LaRouche has maintained that the AIDS virus is not primarily transmitted through sexual contact--as the world’s leading doctors believe--and that the medical establishment is hiding that fact for political reasons.

During the 10-minute interview, LaRouche also said that the campaign by medical leaders, gays and others to defeat Proposition 64 is “working, perhaps unwittingly, of course, to ensure that I win the 1988 election by a landslide.”

He also dismissed his recent troubles, including $23 million in fines against affiliated groups by a federal judge in Boston, as “simply a dirty political trick involving a section of Sino-Soviet intelligence.”

In another development in the Proposition 64 campaign, faculty members from California’s four schools of public health will release a joint report today saying that the initiative “runs counter to all public health principles.”

The report argues that Proposition 64 would interfere with massive public education programs about the deadly disease, which it calls “the only known effective measure to reduce AIDS transmission.”

California’s schools of public health--UC Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego State University and Loma Linda University--join the list of respected groups that have announced their opposition to Proposition 64. Last week, the traditionally non-political American Red Cross said it would seek the defeat of the measure out of fear that it could endanger the blood supply and harm efforts to control the spread of AIDS.

Proposition 64 would add the condition of being infected with the AIDS virus--whether or not a person is ill--to the state’s legal list of “communicable diseases, a list on which people with AIDS are already included.

The initiative also seeks to compel public health officials to test suspected virus carriers and remove them from schools and certain jobs. An estimated 300,000 state residents are thought to be virus carriers.

In Los Angeles Tuesday, a divided City Council voted 8 to 4 to donate $20,000 to help a West Hollywood dental clinic in its treatment of AIDS patients.

Administrators of the Greene Dental Treatment Center, described as the only county-funded dental clinic regularly administering to AIDS victims, won council approval for city funds, which are contingent on matching dollars from other sources.

Dr. Ronald D. LeBaron, the clinic’s co-founder and co-director, said the facility has treated 252 patients with AIDS in the last 17 months and that another 250 patients will be treated over the next nine months. The city money will be used to buy additional dental equipment, he said.

“If we do not have the equipment we need, we are going to be closing,” LeBaron told council members, “and then there will be no place to treat the dental needs of AIDS patients in the city and county of Los Angeles.”

The clinic, which started in March, 1984, was built by Los Angeles County through the AIDS Project Los Angeles. He said the county has spent about $60,000 for the facility, its installation and the equipment. He declined to tell reporters the clinic’s location because he said directors fear that it may be a target for those disgruntled with AIDS victims.

Times staff writers Kevin Roderick and Victor Merina contributed to this article.