After the AIDS Vote

One benefit of Proposition 64 on Tuesday’s ballot was to increase public awareness of the burgeoning medical crisis that is AIDS. The voters showed good sense in overwhelmingly rejecting Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and his spurious public health claims, which now may rightly be consigned to the dustbin. But doing that still leaves the problem of AIDS, whose toll in resources and lives increases every day.

The more than $2 million spent combatting Proposition 64 could have been used in medical research or in caring for the ill. The resounding defeat of the LaRouche initiative should not be a signal that efforts against AIDS can be relaxed. They cannot be. In recent weeks Surgeon General G. Everett Koop and a distinguished panel of the National Academy of Sciences have underscored the threat that AIDS presents and the catastrophic consequences of not stopping the epidemic.

Sexual behavior is not easy to change. In the past, society’s efforts to alter sexual practices--either for religious or for health reasons--have achieved mixed results at best. No one should think that combatting AIDS through public education will be easy. But it must be done, and it must be done with a commitment of time and money equal to the calamity that will result if it fails.

In six years medical researchers have learned an enormous amount about AIDS and the virus that causes it. They have also learned how much they don’t know and how difficult it will be to come up with a magic bullet that erases the scourge of AIDS from the Earth. Until there is a vaccine, every sexually active person--heterosexual as well as homosexual--is at risk of contracting this fatal disease.

Proposition 64 and Lyndon LaRouche are mercifully behind us, but AIDS is directly in front of us. As a society, we can spare no medical or educational effort against it.