Word: spreading
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Public policy, like medicine, is an inexact science, and when it comes to fighting a frightening, mystifying disease, policymakers, like doctors, are often uncertain how to proceed. For more than a year, as anxiety about AIDS has spread across the nation, the Reagan Administration has been paralyzed by a debate about whether to advocate widespread, mandatory testing for antibodies to the AIDS virus. Secretary of Education William Bennett has been outspoken in arguing that testing is the only way to track and ultimately contain the spread of the fatal virus, which has been detected in nearly 36,000 Americans...
...guidelines are being written at a time when many experts are suggesting that the threat to the general public from AIDS has been exaggerated. Says Harold Jaffe, chief AIDS epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta: "We really have not seen much evidence for the spread of the virus into people who are not in risk groups . . . For most people, the risk of AIDS is essentially zero...
...epidemic of anxiety, and many scientists and researchers are claiming that such widespread fears are unfounded. Koop admits that his dire statements about AIDS are not universally accepted in the medical community. But, he argues, "as a health officer, I have to say that. If I were to spread the word that you don't have to worry much about this, I could really besmirch the office of the Surgeon General...
...spread of the AIDS epidemic as a whole appears to be slowing; the CDC estimates that 75% of those who will get the disease during the next five years have already been infected. Those most at risk of infection are homosexual and bisexual men, intravenous drug users and their sexual partners. But with the gay community now well organized to fight AIDS, the rate of infection among homosexuals appears to be declining. The CDC's Jaffe does not want the public to decrease its vigilance, but he would like to mute the hysteria. AIDS, he says, "is a fairly discrete...
...AIDS were creeping into the heterosexual population, it would most likely be doing so in New York City, which has one-third of the nation's AIDS cases. Yet Rand Stoneburner, director of the city's AIDS research division, says the spread of the disease has been surprisingly circumscribed: "In the most recent tests, we found less than 1% testing positive who were outside the high-risk category...