New AIDS Panelists Share Commitment to Fighting Disease : Health: Presidential appointees come from varied backgrounds, but all offer moving stories of friends lost to illness.

At first glance, they appear to tread little common ground. One is a doctor who drives a Mercedes through Beverly Hills. One runs a church in South-Central. Another works for the city of Los Angeles. A closer look, however, reveals that they share at least one trait: the pain that comes with personal, passionate involvement in the nation’s war against AIDS.

They are the four Los Angeles men and women named Thursday to a presidential advisory council charged with designing policies to combat the epidemic. In a step long overdue in the eyes of many AIDS activists, President Clinton chose 23 people in fields ranging from medicine to politics to serve on the panel, which will offer ideas on policy to the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House.

Each of the four area panelists offered stories Friday of friends who had fallen prey to the disease, which swept away more than 32,000 American lives last year. And they all spoke of AIDS with a tinge of anger in their voice.

R. Scott Hitt, a physician in the Pacific Oaks Medical Group, one of the country’s largest and most aggressive health care providers for HIV patients, was selected to chair the council. Offering treatment by day and practicing political activism by night, Hitt says he believes the key to containing the disease lies in teaching potential victims how to avoid it.

“We have to be vigilant,” Hitt, 36, said in an interview from his Beverly Hills office. “If people aren’t continually educated, it’s going to continue to spread.”

Although previous federal panels, such as the National AIDS Commission established by Congress, have come and gone, he said, the new advisory council is different because “we have a President who will truly listen.”

Hitt, who became involved in the cause “as a member of the gay community and as a witness to the holocaust of that community,” has asked Clinton to attend the panel’s first meeting, which is scheduled to take place in Washington this summer.

A political fund-raiser and strategist, Hitt contributed $1,000 to Clinton’s campaign in 1992 and about $3,000 to several political action committees last year, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The Rev. Altagracia Perez, rector of the Church of St. Philip the Evangelist, already has experience in Washington-style AIDS policy-making. She spoke with Clinton about the epidemic during a White House prayer breakfast held shortly before World AIDS Day last fall, and in 1992 helped write a national agenda for treating HIV-positive women. Before moving from Chicago to lead the South-Central Los Angeles church last year, she created a peer advising program for teen-agers seeking to fight the epidemic.

Perez, 33, said the panel may help demonstrate to legislators how AIDS-related problems are intertwined with other national issues.

“If health care is going to truly be reformed, it has to take into account the people who are the most needy,” she said.

Edward Gould, who was confirmed this week as a commissioner of the city’s Industrial Development Authority, serves on the board of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center. Echoing the sentiments of the council’s chairman, Gould said continual education is crucial to slowing the spread of the disease.

At 51, Gould, who is HIV-positive, has seen the disease rage across the country during the past two decades and now, like a number of other AIDS experts, fears the rise of a “third wave” of cases among “teen-agers, people who don’t realize that they’re at risk because we’re afraid to tell them, and people who are afraid to seek treatment.”

A longtime fund-raiser for the center and other causes, Gould contributed $2,000 to Clinton campaign committees in 1992 and about $7,000 to various political action committees last year, FEC records show.

Alexandra Mary Levine, a hematologist at USC Medical School, said she began encountering young gay men with bizarre lymphomas in the early 1980s.

“The epidemic blossomed around me,” she said. “I’d come into the office at the hospital and there’d be 20 or 30 young people lining the halls, waiting to see me. I felt strongly about the patients.”

Now 50, she has broadened her involvement beyond medicine to become active in a number of social programs. She started an AIDS education curriculum in East Los Angeles high schools and works as a consultant for international businesses trying to battle the epidemic. Registered to vote as an independent, Levine said she has “not seen the commitment I wanted to see” from the Clinton Administration, but expressed high hopes for the presidential panel, saying the dedication of its council members will prevent it from becoming “window dressing.”

“I’ve seen too much wasted life. I’m not going to be part of another wasted effort.”