AIDS Education to Target Teen-Agers : Sexually Active Adolescents May Be Next High-Risk Group

Several months ago, an 18-year-old Orange County youth died of AIDS--contracted, county health officials say, through homosexual contacts.

It was the first teen-age AIDS death reported in the county.

Though Dr. Thomas J. Prendergast, the county epidemiologist, cautions against what he perceives as growing public hysteria over the spread of AIDS, he and other health officials say the death underscores a very real concern about sexually active teen-agers.

A few years ago AIDS was confined primarily to homosexuals and intravenous drug users, but public health officials now are warning that the virus is making inroads into the heterosexual community. And with rebelliousness brimming during the teen-age years, adolescents exploring the mysteries of sex for the first time are an especially vulnerable group, some warn. Health authorities from the U.S. surgeon general on down are saying that the word about AIDS must reach teen-agers, to prevent the spread of the disease now and in the future.

“Teens are too likely to be the next risk group because of their tendencies to experiment with sex and drugs,” said Nancy Radclyffe, administrator of the AIDS Response Program of Orange County.

Last month, the Orange County Health Care Agency’s first official effort to reach teen-agers was launched when the Board of Supervisors approved a controversial brochure called Teens & AIDS. The straightforward, fact-filled pamphlet was prepared by the AIDS Response Program of Orange County, the educational project of the county’s Gay and Lesbian Center.

In producing the pamphlet, “we saw a gap that wasn’t being met at all,” Radclyffe, the program’s administrator, said. Because the county is recommending that the pamphlet be mailed to homes, she said, “this will raise the consciousness of parents, too, as well as teen-agers.”

Many teen-agers, though, already are already thinking about the deadly disease and have become more cautious about sex.

“I think twice about girls I go out with now,” said Mark Russakow, a 19-year-old sophomore at UC Irvine. “Before AIDS, no one even worried about picking up a girl.”

Russakow said that students on campus now tend to avoid anyone with a reputation for promiscuity.

“If you get labeled, your college career is ruined,” he said. “Everyone is getting very conservative.”

A similar sentiment was expressed by some students not yet out of high school.

“I guess you’re more picky these days,” said John Cabello, a 17-year-old junior at Costa Mesa High School, who has a steady, college-age girlfriend. He says his unattached friends are not likely to use condoms and judge whether someone is sexually safe by their “looks and reputation.

“You ask around about somebody, and if she’s got a reputation for being a sleaze, you’re going to know about it.”

Vanessa Roy, an eighth-grader at Ensign Intermediate School in Newport Beach, says that while most of her friends are not yet having sexual intercourse, the specter of AIDS is scary as they consider the future.

“I’m definitely going to use condoms and probably the pill,” said Roy, who noted that her mother used to counsel pregnant teenagers. “I’ll have to know who the guy is and who he has slept with. He’d be the only person I’d be sleeping with, and I’d make him swear to me that he was doing the same or death.” Another teen-ager, who did not want to give his name, said he “used to be wildly promiscuous, and now it’s just not worth it.”

Orange County’s effort to teach teen-agers about AIDS is not unique. Up and down the state, county health officers are meeting with school districts and supplying information to assist them in educating students, says Orange County’s public health officer, Dr. L. Rex Ehling, president of the statewide County Health Officers’ Assn. The state board of education earlier this month tentatively approved guidelines, still under review, for AIDS and sex education in the schools.

AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, is an inevitably fatal disease that cripples the body’s immune system. The AIDS virus is carried in bodily fluids, such as semen and blood, and can be transmitted through intimate sexual contact and the sharing of hypodermic needles.

Orange County’s Teens & AIDS pamphlet explains how the disease is spread and dispels myths that people can catch AIDS through casual encounters. While it briefly states that the safest way to prevent infection is to “avoid sexual penetration” or to be in a “mutually monogamous” relationship with an uninfected person, it also mentions that condoms and spermicide are effective in reducing risks.

The county health care agency has sent letters to all of the county’s school superintendents, offering the pamphlets and suggesting that they be sent to parents so they can be read and discussed at home, where parents also can talk about morals and ethics, Ehling said.

None of the 50,000 brochures has reached a student’s home yet. They are being studied by superintendents and others at the district level.

But the pamphlet already has stirred controversy. Among its chief critics is Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), who says the brochure has a “fatal defect. . . . It treats sexuality devoid of the involvement of morals and ethics, and I think a society is in deep trouble that seeks to treat sexuality in that manner.” He has outlined his objections in letters to county health care officials and to all superintendents, urging them to modify the pamphlet before it is distributed.

County epidemiologist Prendergast says teen-agers, even if they are not sexually active or using drugs intravenously, should be taught about AIDS because lifetime attitudes are developed during adolescence.

“Their patterns of behavior as adults will be determined by the patterns of their behavior in the teen years,” Prendergast said.

Despite the widespread cry for AIDS education, in Orange County only a few school districts are systematically teaching students about the disease.

“It’s all being discussed as if there is a course (on AIDS),” said Beverly Bradley, coordinator of school health for the Orange County Department of Education. “The great assumption is that there is a sex education or a health course. And that’s a myth nationwide, in California and in Orange County.” While some school districts teach about communicable and sexually transmitted diseases, health education in high school can vary “from nothing to a maximum of one semester,” Bradley said.

“People who want to stamp out sex education have an easy job, because for the most part, it doesn’t exist.”

In the Saddleback Unified School District, which has one of the county’s most progressive AIDS education programs, administrators have a few reservations about the county’s Teens & AIDS brochure, which they plan to submit to a committee of physicians and community members for review. The district relied on the same committee to develop its AIDS education curriculum a few years ago.

“There have been some criticisms that need to be considered,” Joseph Platow, assistant superintendent for pupil personnel services, said about the brochure. “There are groups that are saying (the brochure) doesn’t discuss the concept of abstinence. I don’t personally have any problems about teaching students about preventive measures, but I hope that they don’t perceive us giving them tacit approval to having sex as long as they use safety measures. If we decide to use the brochure, we would want to address that.”

Dannemeyer is one of those who criticize the pamphlet because of the way it deals with sexual abstinence, but his criticism is not limited to that subject.

“You cannot separate sex from morality and ethics,” Dannemeyer said. “The ideal is that sex is practiced in a heterosexual, monogamous relationship, within a family unit, between a husband and wife. Kids should be told that. We should not be apologizing for that.

“If we’re going to talk about homosexuality, we should tell kids . . . just how perverse the sex practices are, describe what they do, so they can decide if that really is what they want.”

Dannemeyer also objects to the pamphlet urging readers to contact the AIDS Response Program for further information.

“I don’t believe a pamphlet of this nature should have a number to call of a group that advances the cause of homosexuality,” Dannemeyer said.

Administrator Radclyffe denies that the AIDS Response Program promotes homosexuality. When people call with questions, “they are given AIDS information,” she said. “No form of sexuality is promoted. Their questions are answered, and they are referred to other services, if that’s what’s needed.

“There is too much education to be done without discussing homosexuality versus heterosexuality and what is better or worse.”

Everyone agrees that prevention--that is, education--is the correct approach, but there is little agreement on just how to present the information. And then there’s still the obstacle of making the message sink in with those teenagers who tend to believe they are invulnerable to life’s dangers.

“The incubation period of the virus is what’s so awful. It can give kids a false sense of security,” said State Sen. Gary Hart (D-Santa Barbara), who has introduced a bill that would require junior and senior high schools to show films on AIDS.

“They don’t view it as a pressing problem--’It’s not something that affects me.’ That’s a dangerous strategy,” Hart said. “And add to that the teen-agers’ sense of immortality, whether it’s drinking and driving or whatever. They have this attitude, ‘I’m young, I’m healthy, I’m strong, nothing can happen to me.’ We have to make it clear that it’s not the case for a lot of things.”

What county health officials refer to as the “gradual creeping” of AIDS statistics points up the danger.

The number of people in their early 20s being diagnosed with AIDS is gradually growing larger. Because the virus incubates in the body for several years before it develops into the full-blown disease, someone who is diagnosed with AIDS at age 22 probably was infected when he or she was 17 or 18, one county health official said.

As of Feb. 2, 19.8% of Orange County’s AIDS victims were between 20 and 29. Last July 31, only 19% were in that age group; in January, 1986, the figure 18%, and on Dec. 12, 1985, it was 17%, according to the county.

Said state education Superintendent Bill Honig: “The way you win this is make them see this as an ethical issue--am I going to take control of my behavior, or am I going to give in to peer pressure?

“You have to talk about sexual practices, that there are certain things you shouldn’t do. And you have to be specific about it. You have to talk about dangers of anal intercourse. You can’t be squeamish. That’s what the surgeon general is saying.”

High school students “are certainly ready for explicit material,” Radclyffe said. “But perhaps what they’re not ready to hear,” she said, “is that that safest way to prevent AIDS is to wait until they’re ready to settle down. They don’t want to hear those things. Teen-agers don’t like to hear limitations. And that (sexual abstinence) is the ultimate limit.”

In the Saddleback Unified School District, students are taught about prevention measures, such as condoms, but only in the larger context of sexual responsibility and “personal values,” said Maija Paegle, who taught the health education course last year.

“And once they get the information about AIDS, they have to make hard decisions. It’s their decision (about sexual activity), and it’s a vital one,” Paegle said. The course in no way replaces family involvement, she said. “It’s very difficult to make that decision unless there is a solid foundation of values. And that all goes back to the family.”

In the Capistrano Unified School District, AIDS information is approached “from the Judeo-Christian ethic,” said board President A. Edward Westberg. It is presented in the district’s “family life” curriculum, which also addresses parenting, drug use, sex education and sexually transmitted diseases.

Schools in the Anaheim Union High School and Irvine Unified school districts also teach about AIDS. The Laguna Beach Unified School District, which is working on an AIDS curriculum, earlier this year invited a speaker from the AIDS Response Program to address middle and high school students.

But in many other school districts, such as Huntington Beach Union High School District, there is no AIDS education. Many are waiting for guidelines to be issued by the state Board of Education.

AIDS education is essential, Capistrano’s Westberg said. “I would love to see the education be completely at home, but that’s not always done in our society. You find a number of families who do find time for it, but there are a lot of people who don’t.”

In a way, he added, teaching about deadly consequences of sex is making kids grapple with life’s dark side a little earlier.

“It used to be that all the physical consequences of teen-age sex had remedies of one sort or another. But now we have something in AIDS and herpes that we don’t a cure for. Students learn that herpes is a disease they must live with for the rest of their lives.

“And with AIDS, it’s also for the rest of your life. But your life is going to be very short.”

Times staff writer Heidi Evans contributed to this story.