Poland Learns About AIDS, Seeks an Affordable Way to Meet Challenge

Television viewers here were startled recently by a series of documentary programs designed to inform the public about AIDS, a disease that has yet to appear in large numbers of people in the East Bloc countries.

The first program showed young people sharing cosmetics, food and bath towels, and it resulted in a flurry of telephone calls from alarmed viewers because it failed to make it clear that such contacts are not likely to spread the illness.

“People were asking if this disease was transmitted by towels,” said Prof. Adam Nowoslawski, head of an AIDS testing team at the State Hygiene Research Center. “The narration was prepared by someone who didn’t know anything about the disease.”

Not by Casual Contact

Later programs were careful to emphasize that AIDS--acquired immune deficiency syndrome--is not passed on by casual contact. It showed dinner plates and currency and other objects and at the same time flashed the word nie-- “no”--in large letters to indicate that they pose no danger.

Still, one program raised eyebrows in this strongly Roman Catholic country. It showed a man caressing a woman’s breast, and naked men in bed unwrapping a condom.

“They should have taken into account that children might be up at this hour,” said Brig. Gen. Jerzy Bonczak, a military doctor who is undersecretary of health and public welfare.

Bonczak is in charge of Poland’s anti-AIDS campaign. Despite this lapse, he said, “in general, Polish television is doing a good job.”

He said a recent spate of articles about AIDS in the Polish press was “not at all spontaneous,” and added, “We want to maximize public opinion to prevent the spread of the disease.”

Fear Called Widespread

Fear of AIDS is said to be widespread despite the relatively low incidence here. A booklet about the disease was published last summer and all 30,000 copies were sold within days.

And a Warsaw daily newspaper quoted a gynecologist as saying, after a Caesarean section was performed on a woman who had tested positive for AIDS:

“There was panic in the hospital like I have not seen for years. I have never seen such scared doctors. They were so afraid, and if doctors are afraid, how can you expect others not to be? We all stripped, and each of us had to put on a special suit, on top of this two overalls, hospital shoes, masks, special eye protectors. There were surgical gloves for everyone this time, although usually there are not enough of them.”

But other doctors told a television reporter that there was no panic and that they did not feel endangered by taking part in the operation.

To date there has been just one AIDS death in Poland. The victim was an emigre who was infected while living in New Jersey and died in a Warsaw hospital a week after a friend brought him back last summer.

Bonczak said that tests on 35,000 blood bank donors and 2,000 members of high-risk groups turned up 24 individuals who had been infected--12 homosexuals, 10 hemophiliacs and two prostitutes.

One of the homosexuals, who had lived in the United States, is now in the hospital with a fully developed case of the illness, he said. The others are being observed on an outpatient basis.

“We expect that with the expansion of research, the number (who test positive) will grow,” Bonczak said.

Some Deaths Reported

Although most of the world’s AIDS victims are concentrated in Africa, Western Europe and the United States, four East Bloc countries--Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia--have reported one death each.

Several dozen infected individuals have been identified in the three countries but, as in Poland, public health officials across Eastern Europe are faced with a shortage of the hard currency needed to buy blood-test kits, which are made in the West.

Hungary has announced plans to manufacture the kits, which must be used with more complicated diagnostic equipment, in a joint venture with a Dutch company, but the Warsaw regime, saddled with a foreign debt of $33 billion, will be hard pressed to pay for the 1.5 million units said to be needed.

“We have no money to test all the blood donors, but we hope to start in June,” Nowoslawski, the head of the AIDS test center, said.

The diagnostic kits for AIDS, now being offered to Poland by six Western companies, cost up to $10 each, and Dr. Zofia Kuratowska, author of the booklet that sold out so quickly last summer, said, “That’s not very expensive, but it’s expensive enough for Poland.”

Kuratowska, a former leader of Solidarity, the outlawed free trade union movement, lost her position as head of a postgraduate clinic when martial law was imposed in 1981. She said the authorities apparently concluded that the need for public information about AIDS outweighed her opposition politics when they authorized her to prepare the booklet, which is to reappear soon in a second edition.

Few Tests Made

Because of the shortage of hard currency in Poland, only 5% of all blood donations have been tested for the AIDS virus, Kuratowska said. In the United States, it is common practice to test all blood donations. The problem here is complicated by the negative attitude toward homosexuals, who fear that if they come forward to be tested they will be exposed to criticism.

“This happens only in Poland, because in the U.S.A. or in Hungary it does not pose a problem,” Dr. Jacek Juszczyk of the Posnan Medical Academy told the newspaper Kurier Polski. “Maybe our society is hypocritical, prudish, intolerant to something different? It is probably for this reason that homosexuals prefer to remain in hiding and it is difficult to get to them.”

Although the Catholic Church opposes the use of contraceptive devices, condoms have been available at government-owned newspaper kiosks. But as details about AIDS began reaching the public in recent months, condoms began to vanish from the market in Warsaw, Gdansk and other major cities.

Condom Output to Rise

Responding to the shortage, the deputy director of the Stomil rubber factory was quoted in a newspaper as saying that production this year will be increased to 26 million and that new machines will soon be installed to increase production to 40 million a year.

Prof. Andrzej Stapinski, head of the Institute of Venerological Diseases at the Warsaw Medical Academy, said that condoms should also be available from machines in public restrooms.

Although Gen. Bonczak said he expects the government to allocate the hard currency needed to test 1.5 million blood samples by mid-1988, other doctors involved in the anti-AIDS effort were pessimistic.

“It’s terrible to have to negotiate this with the government,” one said, shaking his head in frustration. “And it is especially terrible because we’re not really sure that we have to do it.”

To bridge the gap, a private group that used to campaign against drug addiction has been asking for donations of hard currency to help buy diagnostic kits.