Capitol Ideas / T-Cells and C-Notes
Bethell, Tom
T-Cells and C-Notes by Tom Bethel! A IDS is now as much a government program as a disease. James Scutero, 33, of Manhattan, told me that his benefits for being labeled HIVantibody-positive include:...
...0 n my way back from Whitman-Walker, I stopped by AIDS Action Council, a key AIDS lobbying group...
...Urn, I can get that figure for you," said Tony Silva, who has a "masters in communications" and a mass of stats at his fingertips...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...in a conference room about twenty employees were meeting...
...The syndrome's continued restriction mostly to illicit drug users and "fast-lane" homosexuals, contrary to prediction, has been masked by a definition that now includes those with a low T-cell count...
...Until recently they received a $100,000 annual grant from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC...
...It is "the only Tom Bethel...
...AIDS activists and NIH researchers have been in solid agreement on the desirability of an infectious culprit...
...How can you say that...
...They are not a target population for educators...
...He was making headway with his "nitrite hypothesis" when at the end of 1994 CDC came along with a brand new cause of Kaposi's...
...the Pentagon spends $98 million...
...HIV is trans16 The American Spectator April 1995 miffed from mother to child...
...A rising percentage of AIDS cases are now black and Hispanic: 58 percentnationwide last year, 52 percent of those alive...
...John Crewdson wrote in the Chicago Tribune last year that the Public Health Service spends $246,511 for each child who dies of AIDS, compared with $803 for each Sudden Infant Death...
...Virtually all those with Kaposi's, the "gay cancer," had used nitrite inhalants called "poppers," a muscle relaxant widely used to facilitate anal intercourse...
...A t the end of January a huge retrovirus conference was held at the Sheraton Hotel, and I spent a few hours in the Poster Hall...
...It was considered too toxic to use against cancer, but in the do-something, do-anything atmosphere of AIDS activism, the FDA approval panel voted for it 10-1 in 1987...
...Notice, too, that the CDC and NIH kept the spotlight off the antecedent behavior of people with AIDS...
...Its shiny-new arts & crafts decor stood out against the bleak environs of 14th and R Streets...
...Among the patients discussed was a regular cocaine user who showed up at the outpatient clinic complaining of fever, chest pains and itching...
...But if it's sexually transmitted, Haverkos asked, "how come more women don't get it...
...He works (occasionally) as a landscape gardener and receives $622 a month from SSI...
...Again, no contest...
...The number has remained unchanged since 1981—a sure sign that there is no epidemic...
...As Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation said, "Only 15 percent go into treatment and only a fraction of those ever go through all the stages and get off drugs...
...About one million people in the U.S...
...The figures are unbelievable, or would be if we were not dealing with so political a phenomenon as AIDS...
...It funds patient care, and is now up to $723 million a year...
...I have complete medical coverage through Medicaid...
...HUD has a $186 million housing program for people with AIDS...
...Ten years ago he was diagnosed with what was called ARC...
...AIDS spending by the Public Health Service (National Institutes of Health, CDC, Ryan White Act, et al...
...asked Kramer...
...After Kramer "attacked" Fauci on C-Span, Fauci said he thought it had gone well...
...Whitman-Walker points out that "you may qualify for cash benefits" through two programs, and their legal people can "help you apply for both...
...New York City, incidentally, is the AIDS capital of the world, with as many cases as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, and Chicago combined...
...A volatile liquid, poppers are mutagenic, and for years Haverkos has believed they were the real cause of Kaposi's among gay men...
...ASAP is "considered to be very conservative" by the myriad left-leaning AIDS groups, Smith says...
...We're still "all at risk...
...I weigh 200 pounds and I rollerblade...
...You don't realize," said Fauci, "you can say things I can't...
...The group included doctors, nurses, nutritionists, psychologists and psychiatrists, home-care attendants, occupational therapists, social workers, case managers and a chaplain...
...More children die from drowning than from AIDS...
...When I mentioned Scutero's benefits to Shepard Smith of Americans for Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP), he said they seemed "not atypical...
...I did nothing but yell at you...
...It is a DNA "chain-terminator," which means it stops cells from dividing...
...Lawrence Altman of the New York Times asked how two new viruses could appear at the same time...
...Curiously, government statistics omit those figures...
...If you're sick, San Francisco is the place to be," he says...
...Herbs and acupuncture are also free...
...He portrayed Fauci in one of his plays, and Fauci (who has been quite a "catch" on New York's social scene) was present on opening night...
...In a recent speech, the latest "AIDS czar" Patricia S. Fleming (who replaced Kristine Gebbie) noted the "remarkable budget" for AIDS "in an era of zero-growth budgeting...
...In 1981 he was at the CDC and on the original Kaposi's Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections Task Force, set up to investigate the rare diseases then appearing among gay men...
...He took me on a tour of the clinic—annual budget, $15 million, half of it from the federal government, 180 full-time employees...
...H ow many people in the U.S...
...It's probably a Herpes-like virus, they said...
...The public affairs director didn't know the name of the GOP health subcommittee chairman replacing Henry Waxman...
...Republican-friendly AIDS group in existence...
...If you have AIDS, "you will probably be considered to be disabled...
...With the Feds picking up the check, hospitals gold-plate AIDS cases...
...They give cumulative totals since 1981—dead included...
...Not much action there...
...ASAP was insufficiently enthusiastic about spreading the condom gospel...
...The total living may be 2,800...
...AIDS Action will barely have to lift a phone to ensure the Ryan White Act is reauthorized...
...ACT-UP protests, and the threat of more, did wonders for the NIH budget...
...So, whatever is causing AIDS may not be HIV, but, hey, it's still a virus...
...We have 50,000 who are HIV-positive and asymptomatic...
...In San Francisco, Mike Trevino, 36, estimates that he has been HIV-positive since AIDS began—perhaps for fifteen years...
...Like the voting rolls of machine pols, however, this too included the dead...
...Medicaid spending is up to $1.8 billion, Social Security Disability to $1.2 billion...
...For those "who are well connected in New York and other big cities such as San Francisco there's a lot they can access," he said...
...The clamor of recipients will far outweigh the silence of the majority...
...It has an estimated 200,000 intravenous drug users—a whole city full of them...
...Pressed for the number, the White House AIDS Policy Office estimates 200,000...
...area...
...In the latest budget round, the Clinton administration has asked for $7.35 billion in AIDS "investments," as they are called...
...Another was an 18-year-old man who, according to his social worker, "is handling his diagnosis through denial...
...are estimated to be HIV-positive...
...To the dismay of every doctor he meets, he avoids the cancer chemotherapy (AZT) that is routinely prescribed for people with AIDS...
...We walked a block to the Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center, opened last year by Liz in person...
...Literally hundreds of retrovirologists were milling about—their labs fully funded thanks to HIV...
...Kramer commands a vocal, placard-bearing supporting cast...
...He has "neurological dementia...
...Project Open Hand brings him meals at home...
...have AIDS...
...But remember, we have had four definitions of AIDS, each more expansive than the last...
...These are New York City Division of AIDS services," he says, "which are better than SSI/SSDI benefits...
...In the "AIDS community," the big story is the growing struggles between blacks and gays over slices of the money pie...
...Some are already calling it KSHV...
...Tony showed me all the facilities—dentist's office, medical lab, counseling rooms, pharmacy...
...He has been "positive" for five years...
...The dissenter, Dr...
...Out of 45 million children under 13, about 2,400 have AIDS...
...The CDC's HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, twenty-five pages of tables, has no figures on those living with AIDS...
...The real total is lower, perhaps as low as 30,000...
...It was the bugs, not the drugs...
...After much pressure from doctors, he has agreed to take AZT—like Ryan White, Kimberly Bergalis, Rudolf Nureyev, Arthur Ashe, and Elizabeth Glaser...
...How many is that...
...A recent government study of fifteen HIV longterm survivors found that they "did not take AZT or other anti-HIV medication," according to the Washington Post...
...Funding should continue for a while yet...
...James Scutero, 33, of Manhattan, told me that his benefits for being labeled HIVantibody-positive include: rent paid in full ($625 per month) for his Upper West Side Manhattan studio apartment, $115 per month in food stamps, and $330 per month cash...
...But the "communities of color [blacks and Hispanics] might not necessarily get the same treatment...
...The New York Times reported last year that about half the 55 members of the AIDS program staff at New York Hospital gathered in a circle to review the status of 32 hospitalized patients...
...Blacks want more pork, but the gays overwhelmingly have the political clout...
...Social Security Disability Insurance is one, and "there are no income requirements...
...Most blacks with AIDS are non-voting intravenous drug users, 80 percent entangled with law enforcement...
...Harry Haverkos, director of AIDS research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, an NIH component...
...I don't take any medication, so I expect to be around for some time," he added...
...And 2,000 volunteers," he added...
...AIDS today can also be diagnosed "presumptively" without an HIV test at all...
...Why did it appear at the same time as HIV...
...If you just have HIV symptoms, but not AIDS, "you may qualify after a doctor evaluates your condition...
...But I saw no sign of a patient...
...they have an expensive suite overlooking the Hilton exit where Reagan was shot...
...Veterans $345 million...
...has reached $2.9 billion...
...Agency for International Development, $121 million (much of it to export condoms to the Third World...
...But Patrick S. Moore of Columbia University, who found the putative new cause of Kaposi's, had many admirers at the retrovirus conference...
...That was all along the beauty of the virus—the non-discriminating, egalitarian pathogen that puts us all at risk...
...It's Michael Bilirakis of Florida...
...With the definition in effect until 1987, today's cumulative total (dead and alive) would be less than one half, and the number living might be no more than 20,000...
...One activity is condom distribution in gay bars—"street outreach," as he put it...
...In the whole AIDS saga, nothing is more revealing than the friendship that developed between the NIH's Anthony Fauci, government's most quoted AIDS researcher, who warned reporters their phone calls wouldn't be returned if they didn't report the story right . . . and Larry Kramer, ACT-UP founder and angry playwright (now also on AZT...
...Such as: Not enough is being spent on AIDS research...
...No longer...
...Kaposi's didn't fit with HIV at all...
...I dropped by the Whitman-Walker Clinic, which treats two out of three people with AIDS in the D.C...
...PAC-happy and ready to protest at the first sign of cuts, they are socially well connected, hold fundraisers and dinners...
...Uh-oh...
...Through Gay Men's Health Crisis, I get free theater tickets, tai-chi classes, massages, and meals...
...Don't look to Republicans to cut back, though...
...Itzak Brook, recalled that on the day of the vote, AIDS activists were patrolling the grounds and buttonholing panelists when they went to the bathroom...
...As to the numbers in D.C., the Washington Post reported: "During the first nine months of [1994] AIDS was diagnosed in 226 heterosexual drug users who got the disease by sharing needles, compared with 199 men who were infected through homosexual sex...
...One attendee was Dr...
...By the city Health Department's latest count, 70,880 New Yorkers have AIDS," the New York Times reported last November...
...Cl 18 The American Spectator April 1995...
...There are lots of benefits for those who qualify...
Vol. 28 • April 1995 • No. 4
