Listen to the Doctor on AIDS

When the President’s heart acted up recently, he didn’t call a lawyer, he called a doctor. He should insist that the White House apply the same common sense to the question of whether America’s borders should be closed to travelers infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS.

Congress passed a bill last year that that left it up to Dr. Louis Sullivan, secretary of health and human services, to decide whether the AIDS virus is so easily transmitted that carriers should be turned away by immigration agents. He declared that HIV is not in the same category with tuberculosis and drafted a proposal to take it off the list of diseases that bar admission to travelers as of June 1. That seemed to settle that. After all, Congress did not ask a lawyer to decide the issue, it asked Washington’s chief physician.

But conservative opposition to the change makes it likely that the ban will not be lifted Saturday and that Sullivan will have a fight on his hands to get it lifted at all.

Lawyers are involved because the Immigration and Naturalization Service is in the Justice Department.

Any delay would be a ridiculous intrusion of politics on a medical decision. Bush should back Sullivan’s judgment that carriers of the AIDS virus are no threat to the public at large and let the ban expire.

As Times writer Marlene Cimons wrote this week, one thing that makes it ridiculous is that the incidence of AIDS inside the United States is four times higher than it is among foreigners outside of our borders. “The truth is,” one health official said, “it’s safer to be involved with an alien.”

Sullivan has called the restriction medically unjustified. AIDS cannot be passed around by “casual contact,” he said, only by sexual intercourse, the use of infected needles by drug addicts or transfusions or other open contact with infected blood. The federal Centers for Disease Control recommended changing the immigration list a year ago. Virtually no health agency thinks the ban makes sense.

As with any controversial policy call in Washington, there is talk of a compromise. But a compromise in this case might only add to a growing list of medical decisions that are based on something other than medicine.