Seeking a Cure for AIDS
* The AIDS Cure Act to establish the AIDS Cure Project, HR 4370, to which you alluded in your May 31 editorial is neither a speedy nor narrow approach to finding a cure for AIDS. Rather, it is a reasoned and focused plan written by ACT UP/New York that would put passion and creativity back into research. It is supported not only by activist groups such as ACT UP/Los Angeles locally but also by city councils, service organizations, politicians, individuals, and ACT UP chapters nationwide.
It is irresponsible if not deadly for you to editorialize for serendipitous research when after 13 years of unfocused research there is no cure for AIDS and no effective treatment for HIV, if, indeed, HIV is the sole cause of AIDS. As a person with AIDS, I can’t afford the luxury of waiting for accidental discoveries of treatments or curatives. With more than 200,000 dead from AIDS in the United States alone, how many more have to die before you stop dismissing the demands of AIDS activists that the government act responsibly and swiftly to end the suffering and deaths from AIDS?
Your editorial is misleading in two ways. First, you suggest that the government and pharmaceutical companies have been in an earnest but failed pursuit to find a cure for AIDS. Profit, career advancement and fame have been the prime motivations for researchers, not a cure. The AIDS Cure Project would be separate from the drug industry-dominated National Institutes of Health to avoid the obvious conflicts of interest. Second, you credit activists with a legitimate outrage but then imply they are to blame for ineffective drugs such as AZT. While AIDS activists could perhaps be accused of being overly zealous and acting in poor taste occasionally, their accomplishments in improving the lives of people with AIDS cannot be ignored and they are in no way accountable for scientific or governmental failure.
The AIDS Cure Project calls not for a speedy cure but expanded research into the basic pathogenesis of AIDS and the study of people with AIDS, not just a virus. Its ultimate goal is a cure that will be available to everyone.
Dr. Bernard N. Fields, Dr. Mervyn F. Silverman and especially Dr. William Paul, new director of the Office of AIDS Research at the NIH, are not offering anything new to AIDS research. What they are trying to do is deflect criticism of their failures and to silence AIDS activists who are relentless in their demands to doctors, scientists and governmental officials to do something about AIDS.
We do need a new beginning on AIDS, and the AIDS Cure Act is that commencement. Read it. Question it. Demand it.
J.T. ANDERSON
West Hollywood
