Pediatric Clinic for AIDS a Reminder of Its Reach

The smiling blond-haired, blue-eyed toddler was still bouncing around the Magic Room at the UCLA Medical Center when U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala somberly observed how the little girl, for all her spirit, represents the broad swath AIDS is cutting through the U.S. population.

“Seeing the pediatric work that is being done here is very important and very moving,” Shalala said as she toured UCLA’s pediatric AIDS clinic Tuesday. “I mean these are families, little kids, and it reminds all of us that when we deal with this plague, we are not just dealing with one part of the population.”

During a 90-minute tour of one of the nation’s most highly regarded pediatric AIDS centers, Shalala and a phalanx of reporters heard the stories of two of those families.

One was that of the blond toddler and her 33-year-old mother, who have the AIDS virus. The unidentified woman and her daughter, who live in the Santa Clarita Valley, met Shalala in the bright playroom, which is dubbed the Magic Room because it was donated to UCLA by former Lakers star Magic Johnson and Pepsi-Cola.

“I don’t know how I was infected,” the soft-spoken mother said. “I know (doctors) estimate it was 10 years ago and it took seven years to actually develop.”

In that time, the woman married and had two children. Her husband and son, she said, have tested negative for the AIDS virus.

The woman said she learned she was carrying the virus in July, when she was hospitalized with pneumonia at Glendale Memorial Hospital. “My reaction?” she said. “I fell apart.”

Shalala also met with Louise Magallon, 33, of Valinda. Magallon is infected with HIV and her husband, David, 29, has AIDS. The couple have three small children--ages 1, 2 and 3--who have not tested positive for the AIDS virus.

Holding her youngest child, Donovan, Louise Magallon told Shalala and others that her husband discovered he was carrying the AIDS virus last year when he tried to donate blood. Medical tests, she said, later suggested that her husband may have contracted the virus as long as 10 years ago, although how he did so remains unclear.

Now, Louise said: “My husband is sick. He has full-blown AIDS.”

And she is struggling to get by.

“Times are hard, but we are going to fight it as long as we can,” she told Shalala.

Shalala came to town to attend the Rose Bowl game between UCLA and the University of Wisconsin, where she was chancellor until she joined the Clinton Cabinet this year. She used the UCLA visit not only to draw attention to the scope of the AIDS problem, but also to showcase the university’s pediatric AIDS center.

In the last five years, UCLA officials say, more than 150 children have been treated in the pediatric AIDS program. Now, 75 pediatric patients and 30 women are enrolled or monitored in more than 20 clinical trials for AIDS and HIV. The program is part of the Los Angeles Pediatric AIDS Consortium, one of 20 groups nationwide funded by the National Institute of Health to test new ways of treating children with HIV-related illnesses and preventing the transmission of HIV from mother to child.

Dr. E. Richard Stiehm, chief of pediatric immunology, said UCLA receives $18 million from a variety of sources for its AIDS research programs. And while he and Dr. Yvonne Bryson, professor of pediatric infectious diseases at UCLA’s School of Medicine, direct one of the nation’s most innovative groups in pediatric AIDS research, Stiehm said much work lies ahead.

“We’re slowly making progress, but it’s a matter of years, not months,” Stiehm said.

After praising the work being done at UCLA, Shalala made a pitch for Clinton’s health care program, particularly as it would affect people who have contracted HIV.

“Certainly there will be no AIDS patient in America who will not have health insurance if the President’s health plan is passed in its present form. And the one thing we will be able to do for the great academic medical centers is that every patient who comes in will have full insurance,” she said.

“The full range of health treatment for AIDS patients is covered under the health plan,” she said. “One of the things we made sure about was that this was not treated like an exotic disease, that it was treated like the plague it really is.”