TV Uses County to Show AIDS Spread to Suburbs : Broadcasting: Health officials confirm CBS estimate that 12,000 O.C. residents are infected with HIV--and many may not know it.

America will pull up its chair next week, turn on the TV and glimpse how it’s coping with AIDS--by viewing Orange County as an example.

A CBS News team, anchored by Dan Rather, spent two weeks talking to local residents with acquired immune deficiency syndrome and to educators for its prime-time TV show, “48 Hours: The Killer Next Door.” It illustrates how AIDS has spread beyond the gay population and inner cities and into white, suburban America. The program, still being edited, will air May 27.

“Orange County is ideal,” executive producer Andrew Heyward said. “It is mostly white, mostly suburban, near a major urban center, and it certainly is no stranger to the AIDS virus.”

County health officials confirmed the show’s estimate that 12,000 people in the county are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS--and many may not know it. (As of January, 1,944 cases of AIDS have been officially reported in the county.)

The show includes reports on middle-class married people with AIDS and on children, gays and single women undergoing anonymous testing. It also features a Cypress day-care worker disclosing his condition over the telephone to his parents on Easter morning and members of a Cal State Fullerton sorority giggling during a graphic condom demonstration.

Heyward said the program is neither an attack nor a defense of county policies and practices. “What’s happening in Orange County vis-a-vis AIDS is the kind of thing that’s happening in many other places in America that are slowly becoming aware that the epidemic cannot be dismissed as someone else’s problem,” he said.

While middle-class heterosexuals with AIDS are a statistically small phenomenon, they show up as devastatingly real individuals, the producer said.

“It’s very dramatic. You meet people there who absolutely didn’t give AIDS a first thought, not to mention a second thought,” he said. “Then suddenly it came along and destroyed their lives. That is certainly going to wake some people up.”

The show includes interviews with a 25-year-old mother who contracted the disease as a teen-ager and a widower who is mourning his wife’s death from AIDS while rearing her two HIV-infected children.

The Cypress day-care worker who tells his parents over the phone that he is HIV positive, with the “48 Hours” cameras rolling, said Tuesday that he learned of his condition three years ago. Kirk Moretti, 24, said he already had been preparing to tell his parents, but the program gave him a chance to send a message of encouragement to viewers nationally.

“The fear (of disclosure) was greater than the reaction in all areas,” said Moretti, who said his parents and employer have been “extremely supportive.”

“I thought it was important to show that,” he said, “maybe to be an example for someone else who was going to do it in the future.”

Moretti, who runs outdoor games and other activities in an extended day-care program for the Los Alamitos School District, is asymptomatic.

While he is nervous about how parents at the school and their children may react to his appearance on the program, he said he is glad he had the experience.

“I think being more afraid of people’s reaction to the disease than the disease itself is a sad reflection of the society,” he said.

The program includes gay residents but does not focus on Laguna Beach, which has a large gay population and one of the highest per-capita AIDS rates in the nation. “We only have an hour,” Heyward said.

Because of the county’s reputation as a bastion of outspoken conservatives, Heyward said, it offers “a good place to reflect the debate about what to tell the children. How explicit do we want to be in educating them about the dangers of AIDS?”

The CBS cameras followed AIDS educator Gary Costa to Alpha Chi Omega, a Cal State Fullerton sorority, where he presented a graphic AIDS prevention program. In part of the program, Costa passed out condoms and rubber penises to the sorority sisters and led them through practice applications.

“We have girls from 17 to 23. It’s an embarrassing thing,” said the sorority’s president, Siri Thomas. “Everybody was giggly and awkward.

“After everybody got over the initial embarrassment, they all seemed overwhelmingly to agree, it was graphic, but in these times and in this area, possibly necessary,” she said.

Some of the young women told the interviewer that they thought it was too explicit, Thomas said, but others agreed that even high-schoolers should have the demonstration.

“It’s worth 10 minutes of giggling and being embarrassed if it saves your life,” she said.

Costa said he believes that the producers “came here expecting something different from what they got.”

“They thought because Orange County is Dannemeyer/Dornan territory, there would be a lot more standing in the way of AIDS education,” he said, referring to conservative Congressmen William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) and Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove).

“When it wasn’t that way, they were somewhat surprised and disappointed,” Costa said.

Still, he believes that the show’s producers had a positive experience, Costa said. “I think they were expecting to find a bunch of people who refuse to be educated (about AIDS) or refuse to hear because they don’t feel they are at risk,” he said.

“Instead, they found a community willing to be educated, with a lot of wonderful (AIDS education) programs available.”