THE RIGHT BOOKS

here is a sexually transmitted disease,” wrote Dr. Olav H. Alvig in American Medical News, December 20, 1985, “with a very long incubation period, that is life threatening, and incurable. AIDS? No, syphilis, prior to 1945. It was defeated by routine epidemiological techniques. Everyone was tested when hospitalized, married, or inducted into the armed forces until the affected were identified, counseled, and all contacts followed. Prior to this public-health effort, syphilis filled one-half of the hospital beds in the United States, just as AIDS will do in five years unless the Federal Government changes its lackadaisical attitudes. Syphilis never had civil rights. Why is AIDS different?”

The reasons why AIDS is different are explained in a comprehensive and alarming little book, AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Summit Ministries Research Center, Manitou Springs, Colo. 80829; $3.95), by David A. Noebel, Wayne C. Lutton, and Paul Cameron, which manages to sample and comment upon, in a brief 149 pages, the best (and worst) that has been written about the rake’s progress of this twentieth-century plague in the United States. AIDS, the authors warn, is becoming the “first politically protected disease” in history, owing to the fact that America’s most recently accredited minority group (with whom the disease is, in this country anyway, predominantly linked), abetted by the media, the “art” world, the federal bureaucracy, and a species of subpolitician, has succeeded in misrepresenting the origins, nature, and gravity of the epidemic in the interest of protecting the “civil rights” of infected individuals, and the at-risk class in general.

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here is a sexually transmitted disease,” wrote Dr. Olav H. Alvig in American Medical News, December 20, 1985, “with a very long incubation period, that is life threatening, and incurable. AIDS? No, syphilis, prior to 1945. It was defeated by routine epidemiological techniques. Everyone was tested when hospitalized, married, or inducted into the armed forces until the affected were identified, counseled, and all contacts followed. Prior to this public-health effort, syphilis filled one-half of the hospital beds in the United States, just as AIDS will do in five years unless the Federal Government changes its lackadaisical attitudes. Syphilis never had civil rights. Why is AIDS different?”

The reasons why AIDS is different are explained in a comprehensive and alarming little book, AIDS: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Summit Ministries Research Center, Manitou Springs, Colo. 80829; $3.95), by David A. Noebel, Wayne C. Lutton, and Paul Cameron, which manages to sample and comment upon, in a brief 149 pages, the best (and worst) that has been written about the rake’s progress of this twentieth-century plague in the United States. AIDS, the authors warn, is becoming the “first politically protected disease” in history, owing to the fact that America’s most recently accredited minority group (with whom the disease is, in this country anyway, predominantly linked), abetted by the media, the “art” world, the federal bureaucracy, and a species of subpolitician, has succeeded in misrepresenting the origins, nature, and gravity of the epidemic in the interest of protecting the “civil rights” of infected individuals, and the at-risk class in general.