Medical Experts Assail Initiative on AIDS : Officials Dismiss Claims Made by Supporters of LaRouche-Backed Prop. 64

Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and his followers hold a unique view of AIDS and the virus that causes the deadly infectious disease--including many beliefs that are dismissed as preposterous in the prevailing medical consensus.

For instance, they say AIDS is a tropical disease that is commonly transmitted by mosquitoes, bed bugs and other insects. It can also be spread through the air like tuberculosis, they say, and be transmitted in schools or restaurants by casual contact with infected people, or “the walking dead,’ as LaRouche calls them.

“A person with AIDS is like a person running around with a machine gun shooting up a neighborhood,” he maintained on a KGO radio talk show in San Francisco last month, where he also suggested isolating infected people.

A Simple Retort

LaRouche, the political extremist who has written that the British monarchy runs a conspiracy of world terrorism and drug-pushing, claims that most medical experts support his views in private but are suppressing the “facts” for political reasons. When his ideas are dismissed as bigotry and hogwash, as the chairman of the California Medical Assn. did on KGO, LaRouche has a simple retort: “The man is lying.”

It may seem absurd to accuse most AIDS researchers and public health officials of lying en masse about AIDS, the acquired immune deficiency syndrome. But that argument underlies the campaign for Proposition 64, the initiative that LaRouche money and followers placed on the California ballot this November.

Specifically, Proposition 64 would add the condition of being infected with the AIDS virus--whether or not a person is ill--to the state’s list of legal “communicable” diseases, a list on which people with AIDS itself are already included. While about 5,200 cases of AIDS have been reported in California, an estimated 300,000 state residents are thought to be carriers of the virus.

Proposition 64 would also seek to compel public health officials to strictly enforce the state’s health and safety code “to preserve the public health from AIDS,” regardless of whether these officials believe that such strict enforcement was appropriate.

If the AIDS initiative is approved, its exact meaning will likely have to be determined by the courts. State law already gives public health officials broad powers to protect the public health from communicable diseases, including the use of isolation and quarantine when these officials believe that such steps are necessary.

The medical community finds Proposition 64 anything but laughable. Close to half of the public favors the quarantine and isolation of AIDS victims--steps that public health officials generally consider to be useless in halting the transmission of the virus--according to a Los Angeles Times poll conducted last month.

At best, medical leaders believe that Proposition 64 is a nonsensical diversion. At worst, they view the AIDS initiative as a pernicious measure that could drive AIDS victims underground and force millions, if not billions, of dollars to be wasted on mandatory screening of the entire population for infection with the AIDS virus and the isolation of everyone who tested positive.

These leaders already fear that LaRouche’s unorthodox positions on AIDS, including his claim to have the world’s best experts at his side, will further confuse the public about how to prevent the spread of the epidemic.

‘Off the Wall’

“What they are proposing is just sort of off the wall,” said Dr. James Chin, chief of the infectious disease branch of the state Department of Health Services and one of a number of AIDS experts who claim that their views have been misrepresented by LaRouche and his backers.

In their public statements, Proposition 64 sponsors say that Chin agreed in a private meeting early this year that mass screening and quarantine are the only methods that will control the spread of AIDS. Chin confirmed that he met with Khushro Ghandhi, the top LaRouche aide in California, in the Sacramento office of state Sen. John T. Doolittle (R-Roseville). But Chin said in an interview that he spent the whole time trying to convince Doolittle and Ghandhi that such approaches were wrong.

“The initiative is dangerous and deceptive,” Chin added. “It is an initiative against AIDS when I don’t think there is anybody in the world who is for AIDS. The stuff they are proposing is not going to have any effect on the way the disease is transmitted.”

Indeed, Secretary of State March Fong Eu said last week she would challenge in court “blatantly false” sections of the ballot argument for Proposition 64 submitted by LaRouche backers, including claims that “AIDS is not hard to get,” and that potential insect and respiratory transmission of the disease and transmission by casual contact are “well established.”

The consensus medical view, as expressed by Dr. Merle Sande, chief of medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year, is that the AIDS virus is spread by sexual contact, the injection of contaminated blood or from an infected mother to her newborn child. High-risk groups in the United States include homosexual and bisexual men, intravenous drug users and hemophiliacs.

Theory Not Proven

Some researchers believe that some forms of sexual relations, such as homosexual anal intercourse, are more likely to transmit the AIDS virus than other forms of sexual relations, such as heterosexual vaginal intercourse. But this theory has not been proven.

Increasing evidence suggests that the infection can be transmitted by either heterosexual or homosexual contact with a person carrying the virus.

Factors favoring transmission may include frequent sexual relations with an infected person or people and damage to the vaginal or anal tissue during sexual relations. If one or both partners have a venereal disease such as herpes or gonorrhea, this is also thought to increase the risk of spreading the AIDS virus.

Although the AIDS virus has been isolated from many body fluids, including saliva and tears, it is almost never spread to health care workers who care for AIDS patients, or those who have casual contact with people infected with the AIDS virus, including food handlers, schoolchildren, co-workers or family members, wrote Sande, who also chairs the University of California’s AIDS Task Force.

Transmission by Insects

Transmission of the disease by insects has been suggested in some scientific reports, but in the consensus view, this theory is both unlikely and unproven.

While it is impossible to prove a zero risk of transmitting the AIDS virus by any of these alternate means, the consensus medical view emphasizes that the extremely low risks posed by these situations should not be confused with the clearly recognized methods of spreading the infection.

The AIDS virus, also known as HTLV-III or HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, attacks the body’s immune system, leaving the victim vulnerable to a variety of infections and tumors. Some people infected with the AIDS virus have remained healthy for more than five years--about as long any infected people have been observed--while others have developed AIDS, which is uniformly fatal, or related diseases. As of July 21, 22,815 Americans had developed AIDS and 12,530 had died from it, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control.

No Treatment, Vaccine

Most public health experts emphasize that the screening of donated blood and education and related measures to change sexual behavior and intravenous drug abuse are the keys to preventing transmission of the AIDS virus. There is no effective treatment for the AIDS virus and no vaccine to prevent infection.

Health officials say that state law already gives them the power to isolate and quarantine patients with AIDS, if necessary. But in their view, isolation and quarantine, which are designed to be used against epidemic diseases that spread through the air or the environment, would not be helpful.

Moreover, such compulsory measures are usually reserved for people who are mentally incompetent or behave irresponsibly by disregarding infection control instructions, such as an individual with a food-born salmonella infection who continues to work in a restaurant.

‘Constitutionally Suspect’

In an unusual Florida case in 1985, a court tried to restrict the sexual activities of a prostitute with AIDS by ordering her to wear an electronic monitor and remain confined to her home.

“General measures of isolation or quarantine for those infected with the AIDS (virus), without regard to confirmed irresponsible conduct by individuals, would be useless as well as constitutionally suspect,” wrote Michael Mills, an attorney who is an expert in the legal aspects of infectious diseases, and San Francisco General Hospital infectious disease specialists Dr. Constance B. Wofsy and Dr. John Mills in a study of the subject published by the New England Journal of Medicine in April.

“I started out thinking that quarantine and isolation had a lot to do with the control of AIDS,” Mills, a partner in the New York City law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt, said in a telephone interview. “As I learned more about what the medical community thought, I came to the conclusion that at the present stage anything other than very specific and probably rare instances of quarantine and isolation is not going to be very helpful.”

Contact With Carrier

A key point of controversy between the backers of Proposition 64 and the rest of the medical community surrounds the small but increasing number of AIDS cases that have occurred outside of high-risk group members.

Most medical experts, such as Dr. Harold Jaffe of the Centers for Disease Control, say these cases can often be traced to heterosexual contact with a virus carrier, including a controversial and widely publicized cluster of more than 50 AIDS cases in Belle Glade, Fla. Heterosexual contact is the predominant means of spread of the AIDS virus in Africa and Haiti, according to Dr. Jonathan Mann, director of the World Health Organization’s AIDS program.

Despite this prevailing view, the proponents of Proposition 64 downplay the importance of heterosexual spread of AIDS.

Key LaRouche Adviser

“Heterosexual transmission of this disease can occur, but I don’t think that it accounts for the majority of cases which fall out of the so-called classic risk groups,” said Dr. John Grauerholz, a Virginia pathologist who is one of LaRouche’s key medical advisers on AIDS. He told the California Medical Assn. that many researchers have “a policy of not seeking relevant environmental data” when investigating such cases of the disease.

Instead, LaRouche and his backers contend that the AIDS virus is often transmitted by environmental factors--thus, their support for the isolation and quarantine of all individuals infected with the virus and their exclusion from schools and from jobs as food handlers.

‘Suppressing This Evidence’

On the KGO talk show, LaRouche pointed to the “insect-bite belt,” which he said includes Florida and the Caribbean. “In the insect-bite belt, we have a very large transmission of AIDS among poor people,” he said. “The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has been suppressing this evidence.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Dr. Peter Drotman, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control’s AIDS program, when asked about LaRouche’s claims. “I don’t know of any study that does what they say it does. Just about all the evidence is on the other side.”

To support their arguments for environmental transmission of the AIDS virus, supporters of Proposition 64 sometimes have misstated the results of scientific studies.

For example, Dr. Nancy Mullan, a Burbank psychiatrist and a signatory to the ballot argument in favor of the AIDS initiative, referred a reporter to a study by Dr. Warren Johnson of Cornell University Medical Center, presented at a medical meeting in Paris in June. She said Johnson’s study showed evidence of transmission of the AIDS virus by insects and “casual factors” in Haiti, and proved that “AIDS spreads more easily in tropical climates.”

Claim Disputed

In fact, the study showed that heterosexual transmission was the predominant means of the spread of the AIDS virus in Haiti, and found no evidence that AIDS was transmitted by insects, casual contact or spread more easily in tropical climates, according to Dr. Jack DeHovitz of St. Clare’s Hospital in New York City, who collaborated with Johnson on the research project.

Another claim that Proposition 64 supporters make in their ballot argument is that the AIDS virus “can survive for upwards of seven days outside the body.” This claim refers to a laboratory experiment conducted by scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and reported in the Sept. 28, 1985, issue of the medical journal Lancet.

Drotman, of the Centers for Disease Control, said the French experiment should not be used to support the hypothesis that AIDS is transmitted through the environment. “The researchers used a greater concentration of virus than one would find in a person,” he explained.

Disinfectants Kill Virus

“In a similar experiment in our laboratory, 99% of the AIDS virus died with drying. All hospital disinfectants and nearly all of the commonly used household disinfectants will kill the virus within minutes. Just because it is possible to recover viral particles from a dry surface, does not mean that this presents a threat of infection to people.”

Proposition 64 is sponsored by the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee. Ghandhi, the president of PANIC, is also West Coast coordinator for the National Democratic Policy Committee, a national LaRouche organization that has no tie to the Democratic Party.

“I’d say right now the only place where you can get competent medical information publicly on AIDS is from us,” Ghandhi said at a June 25 press conference where he announced that Proposition 64 had qualified for the November ballot. “We are the world’s leading experts.”

Offered to Debate

Ghandhi explained that LaRouche, who calls himself the leading economist of the century, had created a group known as the Biological Holocaust Task Force at his Virginia headquarters. The task force, Ghandhi said, pulls together data on the AIDS virus and has collected material on the spread of infectious diseases, particularly in Africa, since 1974.

LaRouche has offered to debate Dr. Gladden V. Elliott, president of the California Medical Assn., and has suggested that Sen. Alan Cranston and his opponent in the Nov. 4 election, Rep. Ed Zschau (R-Los Altos)--both of whom signed ballot arguments opposing Proposition 64--be present. The CMA has declined the debate, saying that it would give LaRouche undue attention.

Group Under Investigation

Another arm of the LaRouche empire, Caucus Distributors Inc., supplied most of the $215,000 spent to gather signatures for the AIDS initiative. The group is under investigation in Virginia for alleged election fraud, and is one of several LaRouche organizations facing daily fines in Boston for refusing to supply records to a grand jury investigating charges of “massive” credit card fraud.

LaRouche has run for President three times, and has announced plans to run again in 1988. He began his political life as a member of the Socialist Workers Party and participated in various Marxist activities until 1974, when one of his groups, now known as the National Caucus of Labor Committees, took a sharp turn to the right. Critics commonly refer to LaRouche now as ultraconservative.

LaRouche once rallied under the banner of the U.S. Labor Party. But his 750 followers who are running for office across the nation this year described themselves as adherents of the National Democratic Policy Committee.