Study of AIDS Vaccines

Regarding your Jan. 31 story about how Dr. Peter Kerndt, chief epidemiologist for L.A. County, was placed on administrative leave due to his efforts to study possible AIDS vaccines in African Americans: I am at a loss to understand how the Health Services Department concluded that Kerndt had “misled community representatives, elected officials, department management and the federal government,” when The Times reported memos informing his superiors about the research.

While it is true that African Americans have been mistreated in the past as research subjects, today all federally funded research on human subjects requires an informed-consent procedure. In securing funding for the study, Kerndt had to have met this basic requirement.

As for Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke’s comment that it is “scientific racism” to focus a study of potential AIDS vaccines on African American women, researchers would simply like to know which is regarded as more “racist”: focusing on African American women, or not focusing on African American women and risking the possibility that successful treatments found for other ethnic groups are never studied in African American populations? You can’t have it both ways. It seems particularly crushing to morale to target research staff for trying to prevent AIDS in all segments of society.

THOMAS R. BELIN PhD

Assistant Professor

Depts. of Biostatistics

and Psychiatry, UCLA