Doctors Lack Data for AIDS Decisions, Official Says

The AIDS epidemic has forced doctors involved in public health to make judgments with too little information on the disease, a federal health official told the American Medical Assn. on Sunday.

“There has never been a greater need for a marriage between clinical medicine and public health,” said Dr. Robert E. Windom, assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Windom’s speech opened the 136th annual meeting of the 406-member House of Delegates representing the nation’s largest organization of doctors.

The AMA will consider several strategies for combatting acquired immune deficiency syndrome at its annual five-day meeting, but the trustees oppose the Reagan Administration’s call for widespread testing.

Public health physicians fighting the AIDS epidemic with the limited information available on the disease must do the best they can, Windom said.

But he said advances have been made rapidly.

“We are looking at a disease that was not known six years and two weeks ago,” Windom said. “. . . In a short time thereafter, 2 1/2 to three years, the virus was identified, isolated, discovered.”

On Saturday, the board of trustees of the 271,000-member AMA released a report calling for mandatory testing for the AIDS virus to be extended to prison inmates and immigrants but not to everyone getting a marriage license, as President Reagan has proposed. The trustees also opposed the testing of everyone entering a hospital.