AIDS Picture Not Rosy

On Jan. 5, you published an article under a headline claiming that AIDS cases in Ventura County had declined by one-third during 1992 and that the reason behind this was increased educational efforts. Larry Dodds, medical director for Ventura County Public Health Services, was attributed as the source of this information.

Perhaps Dodds meant no harm in offering his reading of statistics, although such information for 1992 will not be entirely compiled until March. However, there is no way your story can be viewed except as a statement that AIDS is under control in this county, when, in fact, the infection rates among young women, men and children are rising at an alarming rate.

The public, particularly the young heterosexual public, must be made aware that contracting the HIV virus places them on a fatal track. They must be made aware that, during the period being reported on, AIDS has been defined as a diagnosis only after a patient has suffered an opportunistic infection and that such infection occurs seven to 10 years after the initial HIV infection. During this long period of seemingly good health, an infected person is on a fatal track, inadvertently infecting their sexual partners unless careful prophylactic measures are employed.

The public must be informed that the 273 AIDS cases Dodds reports in this county over the past years are numbers infinitesimal compared to present infection rates. In fact, the Department of Public Health estimates that from 2,000 to 3,000 people in Ventura County are infected. The immunology clinic at Ventura County Medical Center, which began in 1989 with 13 patients, is now seeing 190 patients. The clinic is seeing three new patients every week. The patients are getting younger, and many of them are women and children.

We are witnessing a lengthening of the time before a patient advances to an AIDS diagnosis because of good medical supervision and the use of antiviral drugs, and perhaps Dodds’ statistics partially reflect this. We are not witnessing, as Dodds claims, a lessening in the numbers of AIDS patients because of educational efforts. For that to have happened, our educational efforts would have to have begun a decade ago, before the HIV virus had been identified and the means of transmission known.

It is indeed too bad that these articles are promoting a rosy picture of the AIDS crisis, thus creating a false sense of security in the public--particularly in our young, heterosexual, sexually active population who already feel invincible and convinced that the AIDS problem is not theirs. It is among them just as pregnancy is, and as are all sexually transmitted diseases, and it is the more invidious, for infected and infecting teen-agers will remain asymptomatic until their mid-20s.

HUGO LECKEY, Ventura. Mr. Leckey is a member of the Ventura County HIV Care Consortium.