CDC Finally Agrees With Reagan AIDS/HIV Commission 18 Years Late

It was in 1988 that "The Report of the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic" was written and filed with President Ronald Reagan.

Its recommendations were basically written by Republican Illinois State Representative Penny Pullen, the legislative expert on the subject in the country, in my opinion, and nurse Kristine Gebbie, a liberal Public Health Department Director from both Washington and Oregon before becoming President Bill Clinton's AIDS czar. Perhaps Kristine's ability to compromise is one reason that she ended up on this hate poster.

Shepherd Smith, who founded Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (not the guy on TV), and I worked with Penny far into the morning on what we called the "public protection" side of the issue.

Penny and Kristine met the next day and agreed upon most of the final recommendations.

One of the recommendations was "routine" HIV testing without pre-test counseling. The reasoning was that people deserved to know if they were HIV-infected, because that meant they were infectious.

Now, it is 18 years later and the CDC is finally getting around to implementing that sound recommendation.

I note that the son of another commissioner, Richard DeVos, is now a Republican candidate for governor in Michigan.

I worked with Penny on the issue of HIV through 1992. I became so disgusted with the Centers for Disease Control lack of action to stem the AIDS epidemic that I started calling the agency, "The Centers for the Spread of Disease."

Even when it spent almost a half million dollars investigating the spread of HIV in Illinois prisons--about as much as it spent on its condom TV ads--Penny had to pry the results out of Atlanta with a Freedom of Information request.

The results?

1/3 of 1% of Illinois state prisoners seroconverted within one year of incarceration. And, only those who had been in a local jail for at least three months were tested.

Doesn't sound like much, does it?

If one projects that rate onto the general Illinois population, for the purpose of perspective, it would have turned out that the total of HIV infections among Illinois residents in one year would have equaled the actual total over the life of the epidemic.

More at McHenry County Blog.