Travel Curbs on AIDS-Infected Opposed

U.S. and worldwide restrictions on immigrants and international travelers infected with the AIDS virus were sharply attacked Wednesday at the international conference on AIDS.

The recent detention in Minneapolis of a British traveler with AIDS prompted new calls for a ban on all limitations on worldwide travel by people infected with the AIDS virus.

Henry Wilson, an official of England’s largest AIDS service agency, who was going to the U.S. to take part in an experimental drug trial, returned to England June 3, a day after the Immigration and Naturalization Service informed him upon arrival at the Minneapolis airport that he would be denied admission.

INS officials in St. Paul said in a telephone interview Wednesday that they found Wilson “excludable” on the grounds that he had lied about the reasons for his visit, saying he intended to visit a sister.

Officials of the Terrence Higgins Trust, Wilson’s employer, related the incident at the conference and insisted that Wilson was stopped because the INS found AIDS literature in his luggage and learned that he was sick.

The INS detention, the second of an AIDS-infected foreigner in two months, fueled demands by activist groups at the conference for a ban on all limitations on travel by people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus. The United States considers HIV infection grounds for denying admission, although the rule may be waived if a visit is “in the public interest,” Thomas J. Schiltgen, INS district director in St. Paul, said.

Also Wednesday, the U.S. government’s policy of requiring HIV testing of prospective immigrants, and of denying admission to anyone infected, came under fire from researchers who presented papers examining the value and effectiveness of the 1987 policy.

Among them, Dr. Timothy M. Sankary of the AIDS Prevention Center in San Francisco, who studied 3,266 prospective immigration applicants, called the program ill-conceived in failing to require that immigrants be counseled about how to avoid becoming infected or spreading the virus.

In other reports made Wednesday at the weeklong conference:

- One in six American adults has now been tested for HIV infection, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Most of those were tested when they gave blood, but 16% sought out testing, and 14% were tested in routine screening programs associated with such things as military enlistment.

- The country’s only mandatory premarital HIV screening program, begun in Illinois in January, 1988, is costing $217,641 for every person identified as carrying the virus. Chester J. Kelly of the Illinois Department of Health said only 26 of the 155,458 people who applied for marriage licenses in 1988 tested positive for HIV.

Applicants pay the the cost of the tests.

Kelly said the requirement led to a 22% decline in the number of marriage licenses issued by Illinois in 1988 compared to 1987 and 1986. Meanwhile, the number of licenses issued in neighboring Kenosha County, Wis., in 1988 was 1,604% of the 1987 level, Kelly said.

Repeal of the Illinois program is now under discussion in the Illinois State Senate. Louisiana repealed a similar program after six months. A total of 33 states have considered mandatory premarital HIV testing, Kelly said.

In another study, U.S. Centers for Disease Control researchers said that a nationwide slowing has occurred in the number of new AIDS cases being diagnosed in gay men. The extensive federal review of AIDS diagnoses in gay men followed an analysis by The Times in December that showed a dramatic slowing in such new cases in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City, the American metropolitan regions hit earliest and hardest by the AIDS epidemic.

“The rate of increase in (AIDS) cases among homosexual and bisexual men is lower in all areas of the United States in 1987 and early 1988 than in previous years,” the CDC’s Dr. Ruth L. Berkelman said. Addition of previously unreported cases “decreases (the magnitude of the slowing) but it does not really change the overall trend.”

Between July, 1987, and June, 1988, Berkelman said the number of new AIDS cases in white gay men had stabilized in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. In the three cities, cases in minority gay men have increased by 10% a year or less since July 1987.

Times medical writer Robert Steinbrook in Montreal contributed to this article.