Misery’s Heirs

The social havoc wreaked by the AIDS epidemic continues to grow. A report in last week’s Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that 18,500 healthy children and teenagers in the U.S. have lost their mothers to the disease. The study’s authors, from the City University of New York and the Orphan Project, note that most of the children are impoverished and cannot turn to their fathers, who have either died of AIDS, are missing or are unwilling to help out. By the year 2000, the researchers project, the number of AIDS orphans will exceed 80,000.