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63RD STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format. Copyright (c) 1988 Reuters The Reuter Library Report J ) J ) 1 3 June 19, 1988, Sunday, BC cycle LENGTH: 914 words HEADLINE: THE FACE OF AIDS TODAY - MUCH EFFORT, LITTLE PROGRESS BYLINE: By Alan ElsnerDATELZNE: STOCKHOLM, June 19 KEYWORD: AIDS-CONFERENCE PAGE 4 BODY: Once upon a time, AIDS conferences used to be attended'by doctors and scientists. At last week's international AIDS conference in Stockholm,, the 7,000 delegates also included mathematicians, statisticians, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, sexologists, criminol:ogists, psychologists, jurists and historians. Also, gay and womens' rights activists, prostitutes, health ministers and scores of journalists -- everyone it seems except AIDS sufferers themselves. "AIDS has demonstrated eloquently that we must be capable of intellectual travel across the lines whic4separate many disciplines,"'said Halfdan Mahler, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO). "We need to grasp each other's insights regarding the biological, behavioural, social, economic and political pieces of the AIDS problematique," he said. This was another way of saying that with no signs of a scientific breakthrough that could lead to an effective vaccine or cure for AIDS, more and more people in more and more different fields are going to be affected by the. AIDS problem. The conference was jointly organised by the WHO and Swedish medical and social services organisations. According to WHO figures, some 94,000 cases Syndrome (AIDS) have been reported worldwide. of Acquired Immune Deficiency But the real figure could be double that, while between five and 10 people are believed to have been infected with HIV, the virus which causes Millions of those will become i~ll within the next decade and hundreds of thousands will die. Some delegates to the conference attacked the record of the early years of AIDS research as being too obsessed with the vision of a quick fix -- a miracle cure or mass vaccine that could stop the epidemic in its tracks. ~

PAGE 5 j (c) 1:988 Reuters;, June 19, 1988 ? "We are too concerned with drugs and vaccines," said David Baltimore of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Here we are eight years into the decade of AIDS'and we know~that drugs and vaccines are hard to come by. We need to go back to HIV as a virus, figure out its secrets, find its Achilles heel, the chinks in its armour, act like smart humans," he said. Many scientists, like Baltimore, used the language and imagery of war in their presentations. Many seemed full of intellectual wonder at the sophistication, complexity and elusiveness of the virus they were studying. HIV, said Reinhart Kurth of the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Frankfurt, West Germany, entered the body like a Trojan horse, lulling the immune system too sleep,, destroying the body's ability to protect itself against infections. ) "Infected cells may act as Trojan horses, allowing the virus to cross the brain-blood barrier and transmit itsel~f to new hosts," he said. This discovery of a so-called "silent period" in HIV infection, when the ~ virus does not replicate and is not detectable by conventional means, was one of the main scientific innovations of the conference. "What happens is that the virus turns itself off and the body's immune system shuts down. Then,, later, the virus springs back to life," said Wi!lliam Haseltine, a researcher withithe Harvard Medical School. One implication was that conventional AIDS tests, which measure the presence of HIV antibodies in the body, are not totally reliable. ~ Another worrying conclusion from the conference was that a mutant strain of the AIDS virus -- known as HIV-2 and previously thought to be a less dangerous variety -- could turn out to be just as deadly as the original. © New causing States evidence suggested that HIV-2' was prevalent in West Africa, where it was a growing number of deaths, and was quickly spreading to the United and Europe. If, as many speakers said, mankind is engaged in a war against AIDS, then the conclusion from the conference was that although science had scored some significant successes, AIDS was still winning. The disease has spread to 136 countries. Now, it is threatening to sweep through drug growing regions of Asia and Latin America and take hold among an army of cocaine users in the United States. It is spreading virtually unchecked in parts of Africa where it seems certain to cause a net population loss in several countries. It is growing fast among heterosexuals in the United States and Europe. "I'm more scared to death than I've ever been. This thing'is much more out of control than anyone is willing to admit," said Robert Could's, head of an AIDS volunteer organisation in Miami. ~

(c) 1988 Reuters; June 19, 1988 PAGE 6 Many believe prevention through education programs holds the best hope. But some campaigns had proved misguided. i King Holmes, a researcher based in Seattle in the United States, said: "Money is being diverted from syphilis control to AIDS control and that is a blueprint for disaster." He said it was becoming increasingly clear from studies that people with other sexually-transmitted diseases, such as syphilis, gonorrhea and genital ulcers were much more likely to catch AIDS. "Control of genital ulcer disease should clearly receive the highest priority in all countries," Holmes said. George Klein of Sweden's Karolinska Institute warned against putting too much faith in education campaigns. "The power of education is limited at best and we only have to look at the record of 20 years of anti-smoking campaigns to see that. It is naive to expect education to have a major impact," he said. "Molecular biology still offers the best hope of bringing HIV under control," he said. TYPE: GENERAL FEATURES SUBJECT: MEDICAL 3