AIDS Education: It Makes Sense

Without a cure for AIDS or a vaccine against it, education is the only hope of slowing the spread of the disease.

This makes a bill now on Gov. Pete Wilson’s desk crucially important. He should sign it into law.

AB 11, sponsored by Assemblywoman Teresa P. Hughes (D-Los Angeles), would require plain talk in class for public school students about how to avoid AIDS. There would be at least two such courses from the seventh through 12th grades.

A handful of numbers dramatize the need: About 5,500 Californians between the ages of 20 and 29 are infected with AIDS. Because the average incubation period for the disease is seven to 10 years, it seems clear that some of them were infected at 13.

The bill would bar students from the lectures if their parents objected. Instructors would be required to emphasize that abstinence from sex and intravenous drug use is the best defense against AIDS. They would draw material for lessons from the U.S. surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Academy of Sciences.

Wilson, whose veto of a bill banning job discrimination against homosexuals created a storm of protest in the gay community, has not said how he leans on AB 11, but there are compelling reasons to lean toward signing.

It is always risky to predict reaction to facts, but surely some of the men surveyed at a Los Angeles AIDS clinic would have behaved differently if they had received education sooner. The survey, taken recently by USC, found that half of the patients continued to have sex after AIDS was diagnosed; as alarming as that is, the statistic is all the more reason to educate and reach people earlier.

Classes would cover the ways in which AIDS can and cannot be transmitted. Although abstinence would head the list of defenses, the courses would discuss condoms and other ways to reduce risk.

The state budget is tight, but cost cannot be an argument against the bill. The state Department of Education estimates the AIDS lessons can be added to existing fitness courses for only $290,000 a year.

As AIDS Project Los Angeles notes, that $290,000 to educate adolescents statewide is less than what it costs the state to care for only 15 AIDS patients. AB 11 makes sense.