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Simple as it is, the arithmetic is also dead wrong. When the epidemic first got under way, there were few cases of AIDS and the virus was spreading among a largely uninfected gay population; thus the ratio of carriers to cases was high, explains James Curran, director of the AIDS program at the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. Today, thanks to a widespread education campaign and safer sex, the rate of new infection among gays has dropped dramatically. But naturally the number of infected people who fall ill continues to rise. As a result, among gays, the ratio of carriers to cases is now 20 to 1. Says Curran: "As the epidemic ages, the ratio will get smaller."
For their study, the sex therapists recruited 800 people from churches, colleges and singles bars in New York City, Atlanta, St. Louis and Los Angeles. They found that only 1 of 400 people who had been monogamous for the past five years tested positive for AIDS antibodies. However, 6% of the group that reported at least six sex partners a year were infected. Masters, Johnson and Kolodny admit that their results "cannot be easily generalized" because those studied were not representative of the population at large. Despite this disclaimer, they conclude, "the AIDS virus has certainly established a beachhead in the ranks of heterosexuals, and . . . the rate of spread among heterosexuals will now begin to escalate at a frightening pace."
While there has not yet been a national study of the general prevalence of the virus, no large-scale studies support the Crisis contention. To the contrary. Since 1985 the Department of Defense has tested nearly 4 million military personnel and found a stable .15% rate of infection. About .2% of the 8.8 million blood donors screened each year by the American Red Cross are infected. "AIDS is making some encroachments into the heterosexual community," says Dr. Douglas Dieterich of New York University Medical Center. "But it is grossly exaggerated to claim that it is running rampant."
Similarly, the sex therapists argue that the chance of catching an AIDS infection from donated blood is not 1 in 40,000, as the blood-bank industry now claims, but 1 in 5,418. They derive that figure from the highly inflated statistic of 3 million AIDS virus carriers. Even then, they do not allow for the fact that 80% of the nation's 18.8 million blood units come from repeat donors, who have a much lower rate of infection.
The most misleading of the authors' assertions, however, fall in the chapter titled "Can You Catch AIDS from a Toilet Seat?" They accurately report that the risk of infection from a source other than sex, contaminated needles, blood or the womb is practically nil. But they proceed to describe in vivid detail how it might be "theoretically possible" to contract AIDS from, among other things, contact lenses, a salad in a restaurant or instruments in a doctor's office. The farfetched examples are so memorable that the caveats are quickly forgotten. Worse, the therapists call for mandatory AIDS tests of all pregnant women, hospital patients between the ages of 15 and 60, convicted prostitutes and marriage-license applicants. Health officials have repeatedly said that such tests are not medically or economically worthwhile and risk driving the disease underground.