Action Needed to Ban Bias Against Victims of AIDS

The ordinance prohibiting discrimination against people with AIDS or AIDS-related conditions that comes before the Orange County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday is needed to protect the public health as well as the rights of people stricken with the deadly disease.

Of the five counties in California with the largest number of AIDS cases, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Alameda already have such ordinances. Orange County is the only one without an anti-discrimination measure, and the supervisors ought to correct that serious shortcoming.

Laguna Beach, which banned discrimination against AIDS victims last year, is the only city in Orange County with such a law. The county’s other 27 cities ought to pass similar statutes.

Some cases of AIDS discrimination have been well-publicized. There was the schoolteacher with AIDS that the County Department of Education tried unsuccessfully to shift to desk duties, and the 11-year-old boy, a hemophiliac with AIDS antibodies in his blood, that a school district tried to keep out of class. But most cases of people denied services, refused jobs or fired from them, or refused rentals or evicted because of their illness go unreported--and unchecked. And that poses a danger for the community.

People should have the right to be tested, and treated, without fear of having their civil rights grossly violated. But public health is also inextricably involved because discrimination, or the fear of it, often discourages people from seeking the health services that can diagnose their condition, provide needed care and reduce the risk of spreading the disease in the community.

AIDS hits the homosexual community hardest, but it also strikes heterosexual child-bearing women, their babies and hemophiliacs. Banning discrimination against AIDS victims has nothing to do with life style. It is sound public health and human rights policy that should be adopted--and vigorously enforced--throughout Orange County.