Children Too Need the Facts on AIDS

Off and on since 1983, I’ve covered the continuing tragedy of a disease called AIDS.

Actually, when I first began writing about it, most of the public--including my editors and me--didn’t know what it was. So we used to spell out the name with capital letters--Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome--describing it then as a disease that suppressed the immune system, killing its victims within a year.

Since I was writing for “a family newspaper,” I would explain in cautious prose that it was transmitted mainly by “intimate sexual contact.” Not by kissing or touching or hugging. These days, we often get more specific, mentioning vaginal or anal sex, as well as other methods of transmission--by sharing hypodermic needles, from an infected mother to her unborn child, or, in the early 1980s, when donated blood wasn’t screened for human immunodeficiency virus, by transfusions.

When the epidemic was new, we also reported that most AIDS victims in this country were homosexuals, followed by intravenous drug users and some Haitians. End of list.

Certainly in Orange County by the mid-’80s, AIDS was overwhelmingly a gay disease and the general public was not paying much attention.

In the summer of 1987, I remember visiting the Laguna Beach home of a 23-year-old AIDS patient named Jim. Sipping iced tea laced with honey, he sat barefoot on his living room couch and described how three of his four roommates had contracted AIDS, one who had recently died at home. When the young man’s body was wheeled out, Jim said quietly, “The neighbors didn’t even know.”

These days Laguna Beach has an HIV advisory committee to provide education and handle discrimination complaints.

Still, many people don’t know when a neighbor is sick--and some AIDS patients are still scared to tell them. Though full-blown AIDS remains fatal, there’s been a major advance in treatment since the early days. HIV infection is now considered a chronic illness and, with help from drugs such as AZT, many patients survive the fevers, the night sweats, the diarrhea for as long as 12 years.

Another change: It’s no longer considered a gay disease. Across the nation, thousands of women and children have AIDS or HIV infections. (Since 1981, 1,637 county residents have contracted AIDS, including 90 women and 10 children.)

Also at risk are heterosexual men, as the nation just learned, to its shock, from a basketball star and idol named Magic Johnson.

Johnson’s TV announcement that he was infected made schoolchildren cry. Conservative legislators and AIDS activists alike applauded his courage in talking publicly about having this sexually transmitted disease.

The news also propelled TV and newspaper reporters into the sort of frenzy we usually reserve for covering a major fire or plane crash. From every vantage point we could think of, we described what this watershed event meant to teens, to educators, to the game of basketball.

As part of a team of reporters, I spent the day after Johnson’s announcement interviewing two very sick AIDS patients at College Hospital Costa Mesa, the county’s only hospital with a ward dedicated to HIV-infected patients.

There I met Buddy, a gaunt computer technician from Huntington Beach. An intravenous line in his left arm, he pulled himself up in bed to express his concern for Johnson.

“I wouldn’t wish this disease on anyone,” Buddy said.

Hospitalized 26 times in four years, life with AIDS had become “a lifetime of torture.” He hoped Johnson would fare better.

An AIDS veteran at 30, Buddy also expressed concern about the young. “I hope to God the little teen-agers with their little girlfriends just doing it up (having intercourse) like a storm” will remember what happened to Johnson, he said. “It upsets me that they don’t have enough common sense.”

But how do you teach common sense about AIDS? And when should that teaching begin?

Since Johnson’s announcement, doctors, educators and parents everywhere have been struggling with this.

Last week, a Santa Ana pediatrician told me that, worried by Johnson’s announcement, an 8-year-old patient had asked him about AIDS--and the doctor hadn’t known how much to say.

“Personally I don’t think any age is too early” to start discussing AIDS, said Neil J. Purcell, Laguna Beach’s chief of police and liaison to the City Council’s HIV advisory committee.

“When the child reaches a point that they understand right from wrong--and that might be 3 years old”--that’s a good time to start, Purcell said in a recent interview.

That view echoes the opinion of many county officials whose job is AIDS education.

County Manager For Disease Control Penny Weismuller quotes former Surgeon General Everett C. Koop: “We should start as soon as possible.”

But with a preschooler, Weismuller said, “you don’t talk about sexual behavior. If they ask a question (about AIDS), you might answer in a simple way . . . that you can’t get it from a classmate, that you don’t need to be afraid, that it’s a serious illness.”

More specific answers are appropriate when a child is older. “If an 8-year-old asks the question, ‘Can you get this from sex?’ You answer that child’s question,” Weismuller said. “Their questions will guide you where you need to take them.”

Parents can reassure an elementary school child worried about AIDS that he is not at risk, said Sandy Landry, the County Department of Eduction’s administrator of health and wellness.

But also, she said, early on they should talk about hygiene and germs--the need to wash hands before meals, for instance, and the need to prevent communicable disease.

With teens, parents can get more specific, discussing dirty needles, unprotected sex and so on.

In all, parents should talk frankly about AIDS “at a developmental level that children can understand,” Landry said.

“Young children are not at risk now,” she said, but they still should be told that “AIDS is a disease people catch.”