AIDS Victims No Classroom Danger--Koop

U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop told about 2,500 school administrators Sunday that students and teachers with AIDS pose no danger to public health.

“From a public health point of view, there is no reason to exclude such a person,” Koop told members of the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals at the Anaheim Convention Center. “You may wish to do so for other reasons--reasons which may or may not be fair to those people. But it would not be for any issue of public health.”

About 54,000 cases of AIDS have been reported nationwide since the first clues to the deadly disease surfaced in Los Angeles in 1981, when five homosexuals were found to have a rare type of pneumonia, Koop said. About 30,000 AIDS patients have died so far, he said.

Koop, however, said frank explanations about how AIDS is contracted and how it can be avoided--which parents and teachers are “morally obligated” to offer students--create another moral dilemma.

“It’s not possible--and it certainly isn’t easy--to discuss AIDS without also discussing sexual intercourse, and several varieties of intercourse at that,” he said. “In my own opinion, this has been the most difficult part of the AIDS epidemic: Having to tell young people the facts about personal and sexual relationships in the context of a horrible, fatal disease.”

Koop said abstinence from sex is the best way for students to keep from getting the AIDS virus. Barring that, he said, “the next best thing is the concept of monogamy” and the use of condoms, which Koop said are “more reliable, as a gadget, than the people who use it.”

Koop said the age at which children should be told about AIDS should be determined in line with community standards.

Not Promiscuous

He also stressed that the vast majority of the country’s estimated 12 million homosexuals and bisexual males--the majority of AIDS victims--are not sexually promiscuous, have not contracted AIDS and probably never will.

Intravenous drug users, who in most cases have contracted AIDS by sharing needles contaminated with AIDS-infected blood, make up the next-largest group of AIDS victims, he said.

“Homosexuality by itself does not cause AIDS,” Koop said. “We’re fighting a deadly disease. We’re not fighting the people who have it or the people who we think might have it.”