Magic: It’s Teaching Time : Olympics controversy shows the world still has a lot to learn about AIDS

Magic Johnson said it when he joined the National Commission on AIDS: He couldn’t teach the world about the disease and how it spreads all by himself. He would need everybody’s help. Help came in a very roundabout way this week.

Johnson, the former Los Angeles Lakers star who is infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS, wants to play basketball with the U.S. team at the Olympic Games in Spain this summer.

On Wednesday, reports quoted Dr. Brian Sando, senior medical director of Australia’s Olympic basketball program, as saying that Johnson could infect other Olympians on the court and that he was recommending that his athletes boycott basketball in Spain if Johnson was on the U.S. team.

The doctor later backed off a bit, saying he had not argued for a boycott and that playing against Johnson would involve but a “small element of risk.”

But it created a controversy and, in turn, an opening into which American HIV specialists pushed a few more facts for the public about how AIDS is communicated.

Sweat, for example, does not contain the HIV virus. There is some in saliva, but saliva inhibits the virus. As for passing the infection through bleeding on an opposing player while battling for a basketball, nobody will say the risk is zero but specialists say the risk is infinitesimal.

It is, according to Drs. Alfred Saah and Michael Johnson of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, “infinitely less likely than the risk faced daily by health care workers.”

These are doctors who, without Magic Johnson being involved, probably could talk themselves hoarse on the subject and still attract only a very small audience.

The episode makes clear that this is a very haphazard way to teach about AIDS, but it is better than nothing.