AIDS locomotive looming closer

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area. Harvard University frequently pays for the cleaning of cars spattered by their bees.

Meselson says the Harvard and SE Asian yellow spots look the same and both • contain pollen.

Also fungi can grow on the Harvard bee dung and Meselson thinks it possible that poisonous fungi are growing on the SE Asian bee do's and producing mycotoxins.

But the idea that the yellow spots could cause illness is pooh-poohed by Meselson.

So we must remain puzzled about alleged chemical warfare by the Russians. Meanwhile, known chemical warfare by the Americans remains ignored!

WHILE pesticides have a place as one of the tactics to be used in protecting crops from pests, il is becoming more and more obvious that as a strategy they are totally inadequate and indeed harmful.

Pesticides (insecticides fungicides, weedkillers, etc) are expensive, they increase the dependence of -farmers OL capitalist monopolies, they ofter harm other wildlife (including sometimes the natural enemies of the pests) and anyway the pests frequently develop toler ance or immunity.

One example of this is thal rats in Britain are now becoming immune not only to Warfarin but also to Difenacoum, the most widely used and success ful replacement for Warfarin.

Soon rats will be resistant tr all anti-coagulant poisons (drug: that cause uncontrollable bleeding) and we will be bac where we started!

A more bizarre example o the failure of the chemical strat egy in agriculture has beel CLASS FIGHTER TOBE 10p plus postage from 214 Sickert Court, London N1 2SY. Toby Rose of the Gay Young Socialists Group interviewed MEL ROSEN of the American Gay Men's Health Crisis after a meeting of 250 people in London recently. Gay Men's Health Crisis sprang from New York's gay community as a response to the killer disease AIDS, Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome.

In America AIDS has provoked an anti-gay backlash. Recently, misinformed and inaccurate articles have appeared in the British press which could lead to something similar happening here. A piece in the Daily Telegraph blamed AIDS on 'promiscuous' gay men and called the disease the "wages of sin" • Other newspapers have predictably dubbed AIDS the gay disease' raising fears about gay blood donors and imported blood products from the USA.

What is AIDS?

It is a breakdown in the immune system. It might be a virus, it might be something else. We're not exactly sure. It's a disease which seems to stop the immune system functioning, allowing other diseases to come through.

AIDS has actually been around since the late '70s. But we didn't know what it was until the summer of 1981. It was then that a number of cases came to the attention of Dr. Friedman Keen at the New York University medical centre.

T-cell

He diagnosed Kaposi's Sarcoma in young homosexual men. Kaposi's Sarcoma is a disease normally found in older Mediterranean men, and it does not kill them, but these New York men did die. Dr. Keen did a number of tests and realised that there was something more than Kaposi's Sarcoma. The victims all had a very low T-cell ratio (the T-cell is a type of cell that kills germs).

Half of the cases reported are in New York, with the next most affected area being California, but there are cases being reported all over the States now. 88 cases have now been reported outside the USA.

About 1,400 cases have been reported in the States but this is underreporting by the Centre for Disease Control. Their definition is when someone comes down with another disease as a result of their resistance being destroyed by AIDS. You could have AIDS for a year or two years before you get another 'oppor tunistic' disease.

We don't know how many have died without us knowing. So far there have been 521 reported deaths in the States, and among the cases reported in 1979 the mortality rate is almost 100%.

Is there a screening process for AIDS?

The problem is that we don't have any definitive test. There is a T-cell test, which is quite expensive, costing about £50, and also there are some skin tests. These will usually come out with something definitive. But there is no one test. There are also some people who have Kaposi's Sarcoma but don't have a low T-cell count.

How long is the incubation period for AIDS?

The incubation period tends to be from six months to two years. How is Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York helping AIDS sufferers?

We have about 1,000 volunteers working for us, making it the largest gay health organisation ever. When a person gets sick we send out a crisis intervention councillor and they stay with people until they come out of the crisis.

You tell a person they are sick and dying, and their whole life begins to fall apart. If they are gay, they might go home to an empty household.

We train the councillors ourselves. When the sufferers realise they may not die next week, or next month or even next year, we put them into one of our support groups:

We have Mother/Father groups and lover groups which also have wives in them. We have individual therapists who are all certified social workers and psychiatrists; a buddies system, which is a home-help system, cooking and cleaning when the person can no longer do it for themselves; and financial aid committee. This disease does not discriminate between socio-economic groups. Even people who have made quite a lot of money run out with all the medical bills. We are caring for 200 people at the moment.

How are the Health Authorities responding?

The doctors involved with the patients are terrific and very sensitive, and except for one or two I can't say anything bad about them. I do have a lot of nasty things to say about the National Institutes for Health, the government body which does research in their own laboratories and also gives money out for research.

They have received $9 million for AIDS in just this year. $5 million was to be given to outside research facilities. They have only given away $1 million, and we have 300 people dead. If this was any other section of the population, affecting mainstream America, they would have been giving out all the money and more. We think we're being discriminated against. We know we are being discriminated against.

What is your message to gay population?

There's a locomotive coming down the track fast. Even though it may not be terribly visible, it's coming down.

Before it's too late you would be wise to limit the number of sexual contacts. Have as much sex as you want, because that's only human, but try to limit it to as few people as possible and know the people you are having sex with.

Finally, how long before we find a cure for AIDS?

There are basically two theories. AIDS may be caused by multiple sexual contacts and the exposure to so many germs overwhelming the immune system. But it is most probably a transmissible virus. And we have a lot of trouble isolating a virus: for example it took years to isolate the Hepatitis B virus, and then a further ten years to find a vaccine. So we are looking at a ten year process. At this point we are seeing AIDS cases double every six months.

So as I see it, we're in for big probiems, and we are not in for a cure for at least a decade.

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Organiser no.137

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