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Government policymakers could be coming around as well. In New York City, where a program that provided drug addicts with clean needles had been canceled, Mayor David Dinkins announced that he had changed his mind and endorsed a new needle-exchange scheme. Even President Bush, who has done little of substance to support prevention campaigns, made the symbolic gesture of inviting Magic Johnson to fill a vacancy on his National Commission on AIDS. Johnson quickly accepted.
Efforts are also being accelerated on the research front. The World Health Organization, which had held up field trials of several experimental AIDS vaccines pending tests on animals, announced last week that it would skip the time-consuming lab trials and test the vaccines on humans in Brazil, Rwanda, Thailand and Uganda, perhaps within two years. In the U.S. the Centers for Disease Control is considering doing the same thing in the country's AIDS hot spots.
Until there is a vaccine or a cure, responsibility for AIDS in America will have to remain where it is now: with the people in danger of getting and spreading it. For the individual considering a casual sexual encounter, wearing a condom -- or abstaining altogether -- can mean the difference between acquiring a deadly virus and avoiding one. For the country as a whole, it can spell the difference between a contained health problem and one that is out of control.