AIDS Teacher Support Urged

Orange County’s AIDS advisory committee Wednesday told the public health director to take a strong public stance against the notion that AIDS can be transmitted casually.

By unanimous vote, the committee directed Dr. L. Rex Ehling to comment in the case of a county teacher who has been barred from the classroom because he has acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

The committee directed Ehling to tell a federal court and the county Department of Education that teacher Vincent Chalk has recovered from a bout of pneumonia and would not pose a public health risk “to anybody” if he were permitted to re-enter a classroom.

Ehling agreed to the committee’s request and said after the meeting that he would be consulting with county attorneys before he tried to communicate with the court.

Previously, county epidemiologist and deputy health director Thomas Prendergast had said that Chalk posed no risk to students because the AIDS virus is spread by intimate sexual contact or by an exchange of blood--not by casual contact.

Concerned about parental fears about AIDS, the Orange County Department of Education last month transferred Chalk from teaching to a desk job. And last week, a federal judge in Los Angeles refused to halt the transfer, saying, “If I put the fellow back in the classroom and I’m wrong, it could well be catastrophic.”

Members of the committee, formally known as the Countywide HIV-Advisory Committee (HIV stands for the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS), expressed concern that U.S. District Judge William P. Gray and the county Board of Education had set back their efforts to educate teachers, physicians and schoolchildren that AIDS cannot be transmitted by casual contact.

“It goes against what we all are doing in the education of the county,” said advisory committee vice chairwoman Pearl Jemison-Smith.

If Ehling rather than Prendergast was the county spokesman in future court action, “It would have more clout--with the knowledge that this is coming from the county health officer,” Jemison-Smith said.

Kuhn agreed: “The sad thing is that, with what looks like bureaucratic cowardice by the head of the County Department (of education), we’re setting back education about AIDS and the transmission of AIDS. . . . They’re reinforcing an incorrect scientific hypothesis, that it might be transmitted by casual transmission.”