REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : TV’s ‘Bart Simpson’ Drafted Into the War Against Disease

Bart Simpson was drafted into the war against AIDS here at the Sixth International Conference on AIDS Saturday.

At a conference devoid of major breakthroughs promising immediate relief from the ever-rising death toll, one of the biggest sensations was a new and apparently unauthorized T-shirt featuring an image of the cartoon brat.

“AIDS is a global crisis, dude,” reads the caption coming out of Bart’s mouth. The spiky-haired son in “The Simpsons” is depicted wearing the outfit favored by many AIDS activists: a “Silence Equals Death” T-shirt and an earing.

The shirt was produced by a local entrepreneur, who quickly sold out his supply but assured would-be buyers that he was “printing up more.” There was no word Saturday on whether Simpsons creator Matt Groening or ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), which controls the Silence Equals Death logo, would take action to enforce their trademarks.

There was no free lunch Saturday for journalists invited to the Marriott Hotel hospitality suite hosted by the San Francisco Department of Health.

After hosting the notebook-toting press people for three days, city officials shut down the suite in sympathy with a boycott of the hotel’s food services launched Friday by the AIDS Action Council and other organizations. The boycott was undertaken because a member of the Marriott family had provided key support for a federal amendment exempting HIV-infected food handlers from civil rights protections afforded by the pending Americans with Disabilities Act.

“This conference’s objective is to translate science into public policy,” said Dr. Sandra Hernandez, director of San Francisco’s AIDS Activities Office. “It is a cruel irony that the headquarters hotel is run by a corporation that has allowed unreasonable fear to overrule science.” The Marriott Corp. says that it is neutral on the amendment, but Richard Marriott, a son of the company’s founder and a brother of its chairman, lobbied for the amendment as treasurer of the National Restaurant Assn.

“Congress must drop this amendment when it considers the bill this week,” said Jean McGuire, executive director of the AIDS Action Council, the Washington-based lobbying arm of more than 500 AIDS service organizations. “We must lay to rest forever irrational fears about HIV transmission.

The minute-by-minute schedule issued for today’s closing session may give some of the scheduled speakers pause.

The schedule warns: “Speakers who exceed their time will be terminated.”

Robert P. Schmermund, a spokesman for Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Louis Sullivan, said, “I will point it out to the secretary, in case he plans on being long-winded.”

Missing from the more than 12,000 researchers and health care workers and numerous stars of the AIDS field here is Dr. Robert Gallo, the National Cancer Institute scientist who had long been credited with first isolating the AIDS-causing human immunodeficieny virus.

At past AIDS conferences Gallo’s star glowed brightest among the science luminaries who gathered to probe the mysterious disorder. But this year Gallo is under a dark cloud of suspicion about his 1984 claim to having discovered HIV.

Reports that the Pasteur Institute in France had actually found the virus earlier--and provided samples to Gallo--have swirled for years. Legal action was threatened, and negotiations between the Americans and French led to Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute being acknowledged as co-discoverer of HIV.

Gallo has denied any fraud occurred, but a recent lengthy report in the Chicago Tribune and an examination of the scandal in the latest issue of Science magazine have drawn new attention to the dispute.

Gallo was scheduled to deliver a paper today on recent findings about Kaposi’s Sarcoma, one of the ailments associated with HIV. But many delegates here say it was wise for Gallo to avoid the scrutiny that would come his way should he appear. With 1,500 journalists here, the virologist would have been pressed to publicly explain the situation. National Cancer Institute officials questioned about his absence say only that Gallo is visiting the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health has begun a new inquiry into the circumstances of the HIV discovery and a congressional subcommittee has shown an interest in investigating.

The grimy corner of 14th and Mission streets in the Mission District is not the kind of place stretch limos usually deposit the well-dressed swells who usually populate this city’s conventions.

But that’s precisely the form of transportation Dr. Mathilde Krim, the scientist and socialite who founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFar), used earlier this week to visit a privately funded needle-exchange program for drug addicts.

The program, known as Prevention Point, is illegal but tolerated by San Francisco officials anxious to halt the transmission of HIV among addicts. Operating two hours a week at four outdoor locations, the program exchanged about 4,000 syringes last week.

Krim, who was photographed distributing needles to addicts, dispatched the stretch limo to wait for her around the corner. “She wanted to take a cab but couldn’t find one,” shrugged AmFar’s director of communications, David Corkery.

President Bush made news by becoming the first head of state in three years not to address the AIDS Conference.

But Bush’s “thousand points of light” slogan was in considerable evidence. An artists collective called Policy of Despair featured the phrase on 1,000 posters bearing pictures of a flaming Molotov cocktail. “When grief becomes rage, anything can happen,” the posters say.

And on Wednesday, Ruth Brinker, the founder of a San Francisco program that delivers hot meals to AIDS patients, got a letter from the White House designating her Project Open Hand “A Point of Light.”

“I would have much preferred a check,” Brinker said.

Though it’s probably not widely known, Nevada law requires condoms to be used in the state’s brothels.

Now a UCLA study of 255 Nevada prostitutes--a sampling that encompasses 87,000 male customers over seven years--has found not only that HIV has been kept out of the brothels but that other occupational hazards have also been checked as well.

At the Chicken Ranch brothel outside Las Vegas, the women have contracted only one case of gonorrhea and no syphilis since condoms became mandatory in 1986, said Dr. Gary A. Richwald of UCLA.