Reagan Names Panel to Chart Fight on AIDS

President Reagan on Thursday appointed a 13-member commission to recommend a national strategy in fighting the AIDS epidemic and vowed that “we’ll not rest till we’ve sent AIDS the way of smallpox and polio.”

The President visited a ward for children suffering from AIDS and then told an audience at the National Institutes of Health:

“After the visit to the ward today and after the death by AIDS of friends and former associates, this is my prayer: One way or another, whether by breakthrough or steady progress, we will beat this disease.”

During the hospital visit, the President was introduced to four children being treated for AIDS, including a 14-month-old boy that the President picked up and held. The child had contracted the disease from his mother, a drug user, before birth.

The panel, formally known as the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic, includes members with experience in the fields of research, medical care and its costs, and public health, among others. But the makeup of the commission was criticized by some of those most active in AIDS-related issues for not including some of the best known experts in the efforts to halt the spread of the disease and to find a cure.

‘Have No Background’

“These are people who, with one or two exceptions, have no background in AIDS. It will take them a year just to be brought up-to-date,” said Thomas Stoddard, executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay rights organization in New York City.

The members of the commission are:

Colleen Conway-Welch, dean of nursing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville; John J. Creedon, president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. of New York; Theresa L. Crenshaw, director of the Crenshaw Clinic of San Diego, which specializes in the evaluation and treatment of sexual dysfunction and sexual medicine; Richard M. De Vos, president of the Amway Corp. of Grand Rapids, Mich.; Burton James Lee III, a specialist in the treatment of lymphomas at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Frank Lilly, chairman of the genetics department of the Albert Einstein Medical Center in New York and an acknowledged homosexual.

Also, Woodrow A. Myers Jr., Indiana state health commissioner; Cardinal John O’Connor, Roman Catholic archbishop of New York; Penny Pullen, sponsor of AIDS-related legislation in the Illinois House of Representatives; Cory SerVaas, editor and publisher of the Saturday Evening Post and medical director of the Foundation for Preventative Medicine; William B. Walsh, founder, president and medical director of Project HOPE, and Adm. James D. Watkins, retired chief of naval operations.

The appointment of the chairman, William Eugene Mayberry, an endocrinologist and chief executive officer of the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, Minn., was announced June 25.

Among the commission members, Pullen has been criticized for offering legislation that some say would discourage people from being tested for AIDS. And Cardinal O’Connor, according to Stoddard, opposed an executive order by New York Mayor Edward I. Koch forbidding discrimination against homosexuals.

Reagan told the panel to recommend in one year measures that federal, state and local officials can take to stop the disease, to assist in research toward a cure and to improve the care of those the disease has struck.

The panel is being asked to review efforts at educating the public about the disease, to examine the impact that the needs of AIDS patients will have on the national health care system, to evaluate current research, to identify areas for future research, to assess the spread of the disease and to study the legal and ethical issues related to AIDS.

The commission, Reagan said, “will recommend a full-fledged strategy for battling AIDS.”

Need for ‘Common Sense’

“What we need right now in the battle against AIDS is a good strong dose of common sense. It seems to me common sense to recognize that when it comes to stopping the spread of AIDS, medicine and morality teach the same lessons,” Reagan said, in an apparent reference to the role of sexual abstinence in halting the spread of the disease.

“It’s also common sense that ignorance about the extent of the spread of AIDS won’t help anyone--those who have it, those who might get it, those who are looking for ways of preventing its spread. This is why I called recently for certain kinds of testing,” the President said.

On May 31, Reagan called for “routine” testing of applicants for marriage licenses, drug abusers, certain prisoners and others to locate carriers of the virus.

Crenshaw, 44, the only Californian on the panel, has become increasingly outspoken about AIDS, questioning the efficacy of condoms, calling for widespread testing of adults and children and once arguing that children with AIDS be barred from schools. She contends that 25% of the human race could die of AIDS.

“The only safe sex is celibacy or masturbation,” Crenshaw has said, articulating a position she has said she would like impressed upon schoolchildren. “Next best is monogamy with a trustworthy partner who is not already infected.”

Crenshaw, a graduate of UC Irvine School of Medicine, who also spent a year at the Masters and Johnson Sex Institute in St. Louis, is the author of “Bedside Manners: Your Guide to Better Sex” and co-host of “Women on Sex,” a television program broadcast on the Playboy Channel.

Meanwhile, the Labor Department said that it would fine hospitals that do not follow what had been voluntary guidelines for protecting employees from contagious blood diseases, after nine health care workers contracted the AIDS virus on the job.

Nature of Guidelines

The guidelines require use of puncture-resistant containers the size of small wastebaskets to dispose of used needles, syringes and scalpel blades and wearing gloves--and masks and goggles, if necessary--when exposed to a patient’s blood or other bodily fluids.

AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, is caused by a virus that destroys the immune system, leaving the individual powerless against otherwise rare opportunistic infections and cancers. The virus can also invade the central nervous system, resulting in severe neurological disorders.

AIDS is commonly transmitted through sexual intercourse, the sharing of unsterilized hypodermic needles and from woman to fetus during pregnancy. In this country AIDS has primarily afflicted homosexual and bisexual men and intravenous drug users and their sexual partners.

As of Monday, 38,808 cases had been diagnosed in the United States, resulting in 22,328 deaths.