The Only ‘Magic Bullet’ Is the Truth : Be forthright about AIDS and risk promiscuity, or say nothing and risk even more?

Magic Johnson’s recent announcement that he is infected with the virus that causes AIDS brought some hope that the disclosure could become a tool for education about sex and AIDS. But as Times staff writers Sam Fulwood III and Marlene Cimons discovered, many young people have yet to learn the lesson that Johnson and others are trying hard to teach. AIDS has steadily crept into every segment of society, yet debate still rages over the use of sex education to combat the disease.

Fox Broadcasting Co. began to air condom ads last month, becoming the first television network to end the deplorable double standard that has long permitted the advertisement of female contraceptives while banning condom ads. New York City recently began to make condoms available to all public school students. But parents and school officials in Los Angeles and Orange counties are still fighting weary battles over the propriety of sex and AIDS education.

But if AIDS is a “new” disease, it behooves us to remember that the conundrum into which it puts us is an uncomfortably old one: Be forthright and risk encouraging promiscuity or say nothing and risk even more.

For much of this century the rapid spread of syphilis, like AIDS, was represented as merely a failure of self-control. Those who contracted it--by the early 1930s about one of every 10 Americans had syphilis--became symbols of corrupt sexuality.

Advances in bacteriology by the early 20th Century allowed physicians to understand the full, terrible course of untreated syphilis. Paralysis. Insanity. Sometimes death. These scientific advances prompted many physicians to advocate prevention through more candid education. Some repudiated the so-called “medical secret,” the common practice of withholding knowledge from a wife of her husband’s syphilis, even though a doctor’s silence often led to the infection of women and unborn children. Physicians and health advocates had introduced sex education courses in schools by the 1920s. And in World War II, the U.S. military had comprehensive programs in place to educate personnel on the dangers of unprotected sex.

By today’s standards, sex education in these early years seems oddly indirect and euphemistic. But it was nonetheless controversial: In 1934 CBS radio forbade the New York state health commissioner to utter the word syphilis in a broadcast.

The introduction of penicillin in the 1940s, which cured syphilis, truncated the prevention debate. Alas, no such “magic bullet” is yet on the horizon for AIDS. The only “cure” is an old one: the unvarnished truth about transmission and prevention.