ABLEnews Extra
          
               Violating A Person's Right's

     [The following file may be freq'd as HIV41222.* from
     1:109/909 and other BBS's that carry the ABLEFiles
     Distribution Network (AFDN) and--for about one week--
     ftp'd from FTP.FIDONET.ORG on the Internet. Please
     allow a few days for processing.]

Elizabeth Glaser died on December 4 of AIDS, as a result of an infected
blood transfusion 13 years ago. In recent years, she had made a
fundamental difference in the treatment of HIV infection and AIDS.
Previously, no funds had been spent on pediatric AIDS research. But
because of her extraordinary energy and persuasiveness, millions of
dollars are now allocated to such research, and her own Pediatric AIDS
Foundation--formed with two friends--has raised more than $30 million
for pediatric research and education.

Writing about her the day after she died, Jim Dwyer of Newsday-- who has
been focusing on pediatric AIDS--noted that "earlier this year, the
research money she championed led to the most stunning success of all
the AIDS study programs. A treatment was able to reduce by two-thirds
the chance that a pregnant woman with HIV will give the disease to their
children."

On the "CBS Evening News," Dr. Anthony Fauci, an AIDS expert at the
National Institutes of Health, said of that new breakthrough: "It was a
trial in which women who are HIV infected were given AZT during the
pregnancy and at the time of delivery, then [it was given] to the child
for a couple of weeks after. And the transmittability from the infected
mother to the child decreased dramatically--from 28.5% in the mothers
who were not treated to 8.3% of the treated mothers."

On the same day as Dr. Fauci's CBS news report on the AZT study,
Patricia Kean of Newsday interviewed Patricia Fleming, the new White
House director of AIDS policy.

Kean: "A recent study found that HIV-positive women who took AZT
dramatically reduced the chances of passing along the virus to newborns.
In light of that, would you be in favor of mandatory prenatal testing?"

Fleming: "No, I am in favor of having providers offer tests to pregnant
women and to all women. I think it's a violation of a person's rights to
impose a test they have not consented to."

If there were a comparable breakthrough in preventing the transmission
of an ultimately fatal infection to a child, testing the mother to find
out if she has the virus would take place as an essential public health
measure.

But where HIV is concerned, treatment and prevention become a political
issue. Patricia Fleming says she would have providers "offer" the test.
That means voluntary counseling which does not offend the AIDS
establishment. But counseling is far from being totally effective.

So the new AIDS czar is actually saying that those mothers who are not
persuaded to take the test--or who never show up at the hospital until
it's time to give birth--will keep their privacy intact. But their
children may have the privacy of the grave.

In November, "CBS Evening News" had broadcast another report on the
remarkable impact of the new AZT discovery. Dr. Philip Pizzo of the
National Institutes of Health said that if all the pregnant women were
tested for the HIV infection and then were given AZT, many children's
lives could be saved.

Speaking for the opposition, Dr. Ruth Macklin, a bioethicist at
the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, said: "It is an
invasion of privacy. It threatens the woman's interests."

Macklin was asked: "Is [the mother's] freedom that important that you
might allow 15,000 babies' lives to be poured down the drain?"

"At a certain point," the prominent bioethicist answered, "one balances
freedom against lives. We fight wars to preserve freedom, knowing that a
certain number of people will die."

On future Veterans Day, will these early victims of AIDS be remembered
as having given their lives for freedom?

Meanwhile, the ACLU--particularly it's New York affiliate-- continues to
unequivocally oppose mandatory HIV testing of mothers during pregnancy
or at birth.

I am told by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that "among
children one to four years old, AIDS is now the sixth or seventh leading
cause of death." By the year 2000, in view of the resistance to
mandatory--or at least routine--testing of women during pregnancy and at
birth, it will surely be higher on the list.

[AIDS Breakthrough and AIDS Politics, Nat Hentoff, op-ed, Washington
Post, December 22, 1994]

          A Fidonet-backbone echo featuring
          disability/medical news and  information,
          ABLEnews is carried by more than 430 BBSs in
          the US,  Canada, Australia, Great Britain,
          Greece, New Zealand, and Sweden. The echo,
          available from Fidonet and Planet Connect, is
          gated to the ADANet, FamilyNet, and World
          Message Exchange networks.
                                     
          ABLEnews text files--including our digest Of
          Note (suitable for bulletin use) are
          disseminated via the ABLEfile Distribution
          Network, available from the filebone, Planet
          Connect, and ftp. fidonet.org

...For further information, contact CURE, 812 Stephen St.,
Berkeley Springs, WV 25411. 304-258-LIFE/258-5433
(earl.appleby@deafworld.com)

 


