Never Belonged on That List : Sullivan kills ridiculous AIDS-watch for visiting foreigners

The federal government is preparing to cancel a particularly malevolent act of discrimination against people infected with the AIDS virus.

Using power granted to him by Congress late last year, Dr. Louis H. Sullivan, secretary of health and human services, proposes to drop AIDS from a list of diseases that the Immigration and Naturalization Service uses to prevent travelers from entering the United States. Once it is approved by the service and the State Department, it will take effect June 1.

This is a wise move by Sullivan, following up on a wise move by Rep. J. Roy Rowland (D-Ga.), who sponsored legislation that passed to strike an odious 1987 law sponsored by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). It forced the AIDS virus onto the immigration list.

What Sullivan is doing will rescind an act of discrimination that has no foundation in medicine or science. It will reaffirm medicine’s judgment that the AIDS virus cannot be transmitted by casual contact, the only widespread deadly disease with that limitation. Sullivan’s action also will remove a barrier to travel in the United States that made the country look ridiculous to health organizations around the world. It is, in fact, a barrier that has kept only a relatively small number of people infected with the AIDS virus out of a country where an estimated 1.5 million people are infected.

But the most important reward for Sullivan’s action is likely to come in the way information on AIDS and AIDS research is shared globally. Sullivan’s decision will help. Because AIDS is a global disease, information about its transmission can come from any part of the world. Any barrier to the flow of information--and that includes the kind of visiting researchers from abroad who have threatened to boycott future U.S. AIDS conferences because of the listing--becomes a barrier to fighting AIDS.

A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control early this year underlines the fact that until a cure for AIDS emerges--and nobody knows when, if ever, that may happen--the world’s most potent weapon against AIDS is education.