The Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, by C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 36 pp., free to the public)
Recent developments on the AIDS front are not encouraging. In late October, The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the AIDS virus can cause new types of fatal diseases by infecting patients already carrying a related virus. In November, the discovery of two new AIDS-causing viruses was revealed, both of which can escape detection by the existing AIDS blood test (New York Times, Nov. 7 and Nov. 20, 1986). And the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that, despite explicit notification that they should not donate blood, some “high-risk” AIDS carriers are still doing so.
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