Cuba and AIDS

DR. Tom Coburn, a low-key 50-year-old family GP who practices obstetrics, mostly for Medicaid patients, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, is the front-runner for the title of Gay Activists’ Public Enemy Number One. It is a designation he is happy to contend for.

In his other job as a Republican congressman (“not my profession, I’m a doctor”), Coburn is the author and primary sponsor of HR-1062, The AIDS Prevention Act of 1997. All the major liberal, civil-liberties, gay, and AIDS organizations—the ACLU, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, NOW, the AIDS Action Council, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, People for the American Way, and so on—are in full assault mode against the bill, which if enacted would do something to the AIDS epidemic we’ve never done before: apply to it the standard public-health disease-containment measures of routine testing of at-risk individuals (although individuals should have the right to refuse testing), confidential reporting by name of those infected to local health authorities, and aggressive partner notification. In other words, it will make public-health personnel treat AIDS—the number one killer of Americans aged 25 to 44—like any other infectious disease.

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Chandler Burr

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DR. Tom Coburn, a low-key 50-year-old family GP who practices obstetrics, mostly for Medicaid patients, in Muskogee, Oklahoma, is the front-runner for the title of Gay Activists’ Public Enemy Number One. It is a designation he is happy to contend for.

In his other job as a Republican congressman (“not my profession, I’m a doctor”), Coburn is the author and primary sponsor of HR-1062, The AIDS Prevention Act of 1997. All the major liberal, civil-liberties, gay, and AIDS organizations—the ACLU, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, NOW, the AIDS Action Council, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, People for the American Way, and so on—are in full assault mode against the bill, which if enacted would do something to the AIDS epidemic we’ve never done before: apply to it the standard public-health disease-containment measures of routine testing of at-risk individuals (although individuals should have the right to refuse testing), confidential reporting by name of those infected to local health authorities, and aggressive partner notification. In other words, it will make public-health personnel treat AIDS—the number one killer of Americans aged 25 to 44—like any other infectious disease.