A 10th-grade boy emerged from a Dorsey High School health class and confirmed that he had indeed learned something that day: AIDS can't be transmitted by giving blood at the Red Cross.
Improperly trained technicians, sloppy lab techniques and a lack of written procedures are to blame for a young woman's injection with a syringe used on an AIDS patient at Mercy Hospital last September, state investigators report.
WASHINGTON - Radical AIDS activists recently chained themselves to the front door of the federal Centers for Disease Control to make yet another point: that women with AIDS are getting a bad deal from the government.
The AIDS virus has triggered an epidemic of suffering and death in Los Angeles. With a cure for AIDS and an effective vaccine still unrealized goals, society may have a better chance of solving and preventing the mistrust, prejudice, and fear that accompany the epidemic.
SAN FRANCISCO - Merck & Co., the world's largest pharmaceuticals company, has begun preliminary human testing of two closely related potential compounds for use against AIDS.
In the first case of its kind, a Los Angeles police officer is seeking a city-paid stress disability pension because he tested HIV positive after arresting a drug suspect who was infected with AIDS and later died of complications from the disease.
A FEEBLE, DISHEVELED OLD MAN shuffles into the study of the graceful, Spanish-style religious residence in Hancock Park. The elderly man, a retired priest who lives here, wears a watch cap and several day's stubble on his face. Clearly senile, he laughs uproariously as he recites, over and over, a nonsensical rhyme about Pancho Villa.
A West Hollywood community organization will take over operation of an AIDS clinic that served only about half the number of patients it was supposed to during the 21 months it was operated by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.
County and state authorities are wrapping up separate investigations into medical practices at Mercy Hospital, where a 23-year-old San Diego woman received an injection from a syringe used previously on a patient with AIDS, authorities said Wednesday.
LAGUNA BEACH - Banking away from the freeways toward the seashore, Laguna Canyon Road fairly sings of the beauty, escape and fun ahead. It skims past a shallow lagoon, then sweeps by towering eucalyptus trees and cattle grazing on hillsides.
SACRAMENTO - Costa Mesa-based ICN Pharmaceuticals lost a bid in Sacramento County Court on Thursday to prevent the state from issuing a "Hazard Alert" to California hospitals about the health threat that ICN's controversial drug ribavirin may pose for pregnant women.
LONG BEACH - The City Council last week agreed to sell a 53-year-old nurse a graffiti-covered duplex that she wants to turn into a home for children with AIDS.
WASHINGTON - Federal health officials are leaning strongly toward recommending that hospitals and other facilities routinely give AIDS tests to surgeons and other health care professionals who perform invasive procedures, then bar those who test positive from such work.
Faced with a worsening AIDS problem growing at the rate of about two cases daily, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday heard recommendations for halting the spread of the disease in San Diego County that included establishing a needle exchange program for illegal drug users.
FRONTERA - Adding their voices to the chorus of criticism aimed at the California Institution for Women here, protesters from a militant AIDS-awareness group charged Friday that inmates infected with the HIV virus suffer from substandard medical care and are unfairly segregated from other prisoners.
An estimated 200,000 Californians are infected with the AIDS virus, but half of them don't know it because they don't have symptoms and haven't been tested. (AIDS can take two to 10 years or more to develop after infection with the HIV virus.) Life-prolonging medication is available and necessary for many of them.
Two top downtown arts organizations will close their doors Saturday and send staff members and associated artists into the streets to pass out AIDS information and bleach kits for cleaning drug needles to the homeless.
Jurors wept Friday morning as they told Dorothy Polikoff that they wouldn't make a hospital compensate her for the death of her husband from AIDS, a disease he acquired by transfusion and then passed on to her before he died in 1987.
SAN DIEGO - A 23-year-old San Diego woman was exposed to a deadly virus at a hospital here after she was treated with a syringe that had been used on an AIDS patient, medical officials said Wednesday.
WASHINGTON - Dr. Alvin Novick recalled the chill he felt when he began receiving calls from health care professionals who had lost their jobs. They felt "stripped of their professions, their future productivity, their income," he said. "Listening to them, my blood ran cold."
The supplies of blood available for medical transfusions in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and most of Western Europe are extremely safe, thanks to increasingly sophisticated screening for AIDS, hepatitis and other contagious diseases.
WASHINGTON - A frequently prescribed antibiotic is proving more effective in preventing the most common life-threatening complication of AIDS than an aerosol medication that is both costly and cumbersome to administer, according to AIDS specialists.
WASHINGTON - AIDS cases among women in the United States have been steadily increasing, and the disease is expected to be among the five leading causes of death among women in 1991, federal health officials reported Thursday.
Two years ago, Gary Cheatham was earning a decent living as a computer analyst. He owned a house, cars, antiques, and other signs of his success. But his priorities shifted when he tested positive for the HIV virus. Feeling a need to do something, Cheatham quit his job, gave away nearly all his possessions, and began providing laundry service for people with AIDS and AIDS-Related Complex.
WASHINGTON - In the frantic crush of last-minute legislation, a little-noticed measure with major implications for AIDS policy is expected to breeze through Congress before it adjourns.
IRVINE - Two Orange County artists have set out on a mission of sorts, a campaign of pictures and words designed to help counter what they feel is a pervasive atmosphere of ignorance, fear and hysteria shrouding the AIDS epidemic.
WASHINGTON - AIDS organizations and public health officials struggled to regroup Monday after a House-Senate conference committee funded landmark AIDS legislation at a level that they say defeats the bill's intent.
WASHINGTON - At least three U.S. companies plan to market insurance specifically designed to protect people whose jobs could expose them to AIDS-infected individuals, such as health care workers, emergency medical technicians and firefighters, The Times has learned.
The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday approved a sweeping AIDS policy that requires comprehensive AIDS education for all city workers and endorses a number of nationally controversial measures, including the distribution of condoms to prisoners during incarceration and bleach to drug users for sterilizing needles.
WASHINGTON - Tuberculosis has become the world's deadliest infectious disease, and the toll could soon rise even more dramatically if controls are not initiated quickly, the World Health Organization said Monday.
The extraordinary case of a Florida dentist suspected of having spread the AIDS virus to a patient has left federal health officials ensnared in an emotional debate over whether to place new restrictions on the activities of infected doctors.
In what authorities believe is the first prosecution of its kind in Los Angeles County, a male prostitute was accused Thursday of continuing to ply his trade while knowing he had tested positive for AIDS.
SAN DIEGO - This city's status as a major center of research into how AIDS affects the brain and central nervous system received a boost Thursday with the announcement that Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation has received a $14-million grant to establish an AIDS Dementia Complex Research Center.
When Carol Schieber learned in October, 1987, that cancer had spread from her breast to her lungs and liver, she discussed her alternatives with a specialist, then opted against standard therapy in favor of experimental treatment.
LONG BEACH - Vincent Chalk, the Irvine teacher who mde national headlines when he won the right to stay at the helm of his classroom while suffering from AIDS, died Tuesday. He was 45.
WASHINGTON - The federal government and the American Foundation for AIDS Research announced Monday that they will jointly sponsor a massive, long-term study to see how AIDS infection progresses in various populations.
Vittorio, 25, has never been in better shape. He exercises regularly, eats well, takes vitamin supplements and meditates to relieve stress. He looks trim and rested, but looks are not what this is about.
NEW YORK - On a sweltering Brooklyn night, two prostitutes emerge from the eerie desolation of garbage-strewn lots into the orange cone of a street light. One of them disappears down the street with a man. The other woman, Donna, 29, moves cautiously as if beckoned by the glaring red brake lights toward a van that has just pulled over.
WASHINGTON - An experiment in providing free needles to drug addicts not only reduced unsafe practices that transmit the AIDS virus but resulted in more addicts seeking drug treatment, a health official involved in the nation's first needle-exchange program said Tuesday.
In a significant outgrowth of the AIDS epidemic, hundreds of people who contracted the deadly disease through blood transfusions are seeking solace in court--and the $2.5-billion blood-selling industry is worried that the legal backlash could be financially devastating.
BETHESDA, Md. - Until recently, whenever 10-year-old Christina Han of Parkton, Md., and her mother visited the National Institutes of Health to obtain treatment for a rare form of cancer that Christina has contracted, they have had to make do staying in a local motel.
A new state report shows that landlords and employers in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties faced more than 400 discrimination complaints in the fiscal year that ended June 25--a slightly higher rate than their counterparts statewide.
Grace Weisenstein, her car loaded with boxes of knickknacks, pulled up to an Atwater Village storefront that is opening soon as a thrift shop to benefit people with AIDS and extracted a brown wig, the first of many items she planned to donate to the project.
Madonna and a host of top-name stars turned out for AIDS Project Los Angeles' fourth annual Commitment to Life benefit Friday, a high-energy show at the Wiltern that took an audience of 2,400 through a night of emotional highs and lows.
WASHINGTON - There is no evidence that the highly publicized heat treatment known as hyperthermia can help AIDS patients, nor is there any reason to encourage further experiments with the procedure, federal health officials said Tuesday.
Culminating efforts that began five years ago, the city of Los Angeles on Friday released its first comprehensive AIDS policy, a document designed largely to prevent the spread of the AIDS virus and preserve the dignity of people with the disease.
Many of the men who come to the two weekly AIDS support groups at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital are not sick. They have not gotten the cancers, pneumonia or other disorders associated with AIDS or AIDS-related complex.
WASHINGTON - The National AIDS Commission said Tuesday that a "shocking" number of physicians and other health care professionals across the nation are still refusing to care for AIDS patients.
In an effort to reduce the 21-week waiting period that AIDS patients now face when seeking help at outpatient county medical facilities, the Los Angeles County Commission on AIDS on Friday recommended the immediate expenditure of $500,000 that had been set aside to staff a clinic next spring.
BOSTON - Women who are in heterosexual relationships but do not know that their partners are bisexual or use drugs are among the most rapidly growing groups at risk for developing AIDS, a San Francisco researcher said Monday.
KIMON BEAZLIE MANAGED TO REACH his mid-40s retaining a free spirit and unflagging energy. He was a Hollywood costume designer with stocky good looks, almond brown eyes and a penchant for six-day workweeks--a habit that earned him, in good times, as much as $80,000 a year.
A Van Nuys woman was bludgeoned to death in Manhattan with a hammer and a wooden statue by her AIDS-afflicted son, who then attempted suicide by setting himself on fire, police said Friday.
WASHINGTON - A pilot project using street outreach and other methods to try to reduce AIDS transmission among drug addicts has helped many to stop or decrease their use of intravenous drugs, according to preliminary data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control.
LAGUNA BEACH - Laguna Beach on Tuesday became the first city in Orange County and one of only a handful in the nation to grant medical benefits to unmarried partners of city employees, including gays and lesbians.
Los Angeles County's strained mental health system won a temporary reprieve from massive state-funding cutbacks Tuesday as the Board of Supervisors finalized a $10.2-billion budget for the coming year.
A young woman barely out of her teens kneels before a grave in a Culver City cemetery. Carved into the headstone is a picture of Minnie Mouse. The dates of birth and death stand like bookends to a too-slim volume, a life that lasted just 43 days.
Dentists at a San Diego conference this weekend said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control was irresponsible in reporting that a young woman probably contracted AIDS during a dental procedure.
A dentist with AIDS may have spread the deadly virus to a patient during a tooth extraction, federal health officials reported Thursday. The finding, if true, marks the first reported instance in which a health-care worker has infected a patient.
A few days after he was found to have AIDS, and still weak from a serious bout with meningitis, Father Luis Olivares got up out of his hospital bed to keep a date with his parishioners at historic Our Lady Queen of Angels Church.
WASHINGTON - The nation's blood supply is not as safe as it should be because of inadequate screening and reporting by the American Red Cross and other blood suppliers, a congressional panel charged Friday.
WASHINGTON - The Senate, facing a second showdown on an emotion-laden issue, reversed itself Wednesday and rejected an attempt by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) to bar persons infected with the AIDS virus from working as food handlers. The vote was 61 to 39.
A community-based group established to give San Diego AIDS patients greater access to promising new drugs announced its first effort Tuesday, testing a drug aimed at a bacterial infection that affects AIDS patients late in their disease.
SACRAMENTO - Creating a debate that pits scientists against AIDS activists, the Legislature has diverted funds from the University of California's AIDS research budget to help pay for early treatment of those infected with the deadly virus.
Responding to a national sense of urgency to find treatments to save the lives of AIDS victims, the Food and Drug Administration has speeded up the process it uses to determine whether a new drug is safe and effective enough to be sold in the United States.
Leslie Berkman; Gregory Crouch; Times Staff Writers
COSTA MESA - Just days before the sixth international conference on AIDS opened in San Francisco last month, something peculiar was going on at ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Father Luis Olivares, the activist Roman Catholic priest and long-time champion of Central American refugees who had been hospitalized for the past month with meningitis, revealed Thursday that he has AIDS.
WASHINGTON - House negotiators on landmark civil rights legislation for the disabled agreed Monday to scrap a provision that would have allowed employers to transfer food handlers with the AIDS virus to other jobs if the public perceived a health risk.
As HemaCare Corp., a tiny medical services company in Sherman Oaks, struggled through much of the 1980s to make a profit on specialized blood services and products, it was unwittingly converging paths with an English scientist looking for a new way to treat AIDS.
LOUIS H. SULLIVAN; Dr. Louis H. Sullivan is the secretary of health and human services. This is excerpted from the speech that protesters drowned out at the international AIDS conference in San Francisco on Sunday.
The many efforts to understand and address AIDS and HIV infection must not become fragmented and divisive. As scientists, advocates and policy-makers, we cannot become simply symbols driven by slogans, using the media as proxy to provide high drama. We must find the compassion and humanity to transcend misunderstanding, hatred and violence.
SAN FRANCISCO - Hundreds of angry AIDS activists armed with sirens, air horns, whistles and weary vocal cords, drowned out the country's top health official Sunday as he called for cooperation, understanding and a willing ear during the closing ceremony of the Sixth International Conference on AIDS.
SAN FRANCISCO - After five hectic days of activism and science, the Sixth International Conference on AIDS concluded Sunday with optimism over the prospects for better treatments and a vaccine but sobering reminders that the worldwide AIDS epidemic remains out of control.
SAN FRANCISCO - Many young physicians entering practice intend to go out of their way to avoid treating people infected with the AIDS virus--less out of fear of infection than out of personal bias against the types of people who most often have the disease, new research shows.
SAN FRANCISCO - There is growing evidence that prevention programs aimed at stopping the spread of the AIDS virus are failing to influence many of those at highest risk, and experts say the reasons include a lack of imaginative approaches and a kind of societal failure of nerve.
SAN FRANCISCO - John Emerson, 84, is receiving visitors inside his "Aerosol Treatment and Sputum Induction Chamber," an isolation booth for AIDS patients with tuberculosis. Kathy Sabel is holding a doll and demonstrating the needle-less "biojector," which she claims injects medication at "the speed of sound."
SAN FRANCISCO - Finding a doctor willing to care for them is hard for people with HIV ailments. That may not change much despite a new education effort announced here by the American Medical Assn.
SAN FRANCISCO - Large-scale tests of AIDS vaccines in uninfected volunteers may begin in two to four years and specialized tests to determine if the vaccines can protect the unborn fetuses of infected pregnant women could begin in 1991, leading vaccine researchers predicted Friday at the international AIDS conference here.
SAN FRANCISCO - The number of health-care workers accidentally infected with the AIDS virus is rising, researchers reported here Friday, while the possibility of using drugs such as AZT to protect them remains in question.
SAN FRANCISCO - AIDS patient advocates and traditional medical representatives clashed here Friday over results of controversial new treatments, with the leader of an underground drug-testing program announcing "powerful" new findings and the editor of a prestigious medical journal denouncing him for practicing "black magic."
SAN FRANCISCO - AIDS researchers Thursday debated a controversial theory that simultaneous infection with the human immunodeficiency virus and small bacteria-like organisms called mycoplasmas helps explain why some people infected with HIV quickly become seriously ill with AIDS, while others remain healthy for years.
SAN FRANCISCO - For the third day in a row, activists and police Thursday carried out their ritual street dance outside the view of most scientists here for the world's largest AIDS conference.
SAN FRANCISCO - Homosexual men, whose widespread adoption of safe-sex practices came close to halting the transmission of the AIDS virus in their communities during the mid-1980s, appear to be "relapsing" into unsafe sexual activities, threatening a new wave of deadly infection through their ranks.
SAN FRANCISCO - Thirteen babies who became infected with the AIDS virus in Soviet hospitals have spread the virus to their mothers in what appears to be the first reported cases of infant-to-mother transmission through breast-feeding.
SAN FRANCISCO - The international AIDS conference opened here Wednesday as activists rushed police barricades outside the Moscone Convention Center and researchers inside pleaded for respect for the scientific method and a recognition of a common purpose unifying scientists and patients.
SAN FRANCISCO - Interest in an all but forgotten experimental AIDS drug, isoprinosine--manufacturered by Newport Pharmaceuticals International Inc. of Laguna Hills--has been renewed by the New England Journal of Medicine's decision to publish a favorable Scandinavian study of the medication.
NEW YORK - When the sixth International Conference on AIDS opens today in San Francisco, the city will be on edge. There are predictions of massive demonstrations by gays and lesbians, threats of disruption, and fears some activists will splash infected blood on police officers.
SAN FRANCISCO - The world's largest annual gathering of AIDS researchers opens today in a city raw with grief over the AIDS deaths of 5,600 of its residents and at the same time hopeful for a medical breakthrough to save thousands of other San Franciscans and millions worldwide.
The 15,000 people descending on San Francisco this week for the sixth International Conference on AIDS will include a few dozen from the wide variety of research programs centered in San Diego.
The Sixth International Conference on AIDS, which opens today in San Francisco, comes at a time of great promise and great frustration for those who have devoted themselves to eradicating this modern plague.
WASHINGTON - AIDS-related discrimination is on the rise across the nation, against not only those ill with the disease or infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, but also their relatives and care-givers, according to the findings of an American Civil Liberties Union study released Saturday.
COSTA MESA - ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc. announced Friday that the Irish government has approved the sale of the firm's controversial drug ribavirin to people infected with the virus that causes AIDS, marking the first time that any nation has done so.
WASHINGTON - Scientists at the University of California at San Francisco, departing from the traditional methods of searching for new drugs, have developed a new computerized technique for identifying compounds that could treat AIDS or other disorders, federal health officials announced Friday.
John arrived exactly on time for his Monday morning appointment. Tall, blue-eyed and slender, he was about to undergo a treatment--a treatment that might not make him better and that could theoretically threaten the medical license of the physician offering it.
WASHINGTON - The House overwhelmingly approved sweeping AIDS legislation Wednesday that would authorize $4.5 billion over five years in disaster relief for cities hardest hit by the fatal disease and for early treatment of those infected with the virus that causes it.
SAN FRANCISCO - Black gay and bisexual men have been slow to adopt safer sex practices despite near-universal knowledge of how the AIDS virus is transmitted, according to the first nationwide survey of black men who have sex with other men.
WASHINGTON - The World Health Organization on Tuesday predicted a cumulative global total of at least 6 million cases of AIDS by the year 2000, with "an alarming rate" of increase of new infections in developing countries.
A San Diego-led research group has been awarded a $6.5-million, five-year federal grant to search for an AIDS vaccine, bringing to two the number of vaccine projects being spearheaded by scientists in the area.
Dan Turner, who survived eight years with AIDS, becoming in the process a personification of hope to those with that fatal disease, has lost his historic struggle.
A report suggesting that a risky and experimental body-heating procedure had resulted in a three-month remission in one AIDS patient with a form of cancer known as Kaposi's sarcoma has spurred curiosity and interest among AIDS and cancer researchers.
BOMBAY, India - The scene at the Sexually Transmitted Disease Clinic, in the heart of Bombay's red-light district, provided painful proof that India is losing the battle with AIDS.
A popular play about AIDS prevention that has been touring public high schools has come under fire from a group of parents on the Palos Verdes Peninsula who contend it unduly promotes the use of condoms to prevent the spread of the deadly disease.
A noisy demonstration forced Los Angeles County supervisors to recess their meeting Tuesday and ended with the arrests of 27 protesters who were removed after demanding increased AIDS funding and smearing "AIDS Care Now!" in red lipstick on a glass barrier in front of the supervisors.
Art exhibitions that approach the subject of AIDS enter a mine field. This difficult territory is studded with medical, social, ethical and political issues that claim a prominent position among the most important of our time. The stakes are high, the ramifications far-reaching. It's no place for good intentions unredeemed by piercing insight.
WASHINGTON - Conservative Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), who rarely prevails in congressional battles over AIDS policy, came away with two-thirds of what he wanted Tuesday, as a House panel added two Dannemeyer amendments to key AIDS legislation sponsored by Democrats.
The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services has begun negotiations aimed at turning over its faltering HIV Early Intervention Clinic in West Hollywood to a consortium of community groups led by the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center.
SAN FRANCISCO - Against a backdrop of skepticism, Burroughs Wellcome, maker of the antiviral drug AZT, is launching an initiative in the 25 U.S. cities with the highest rates of HIV infection to persuade people who might be infected with the AIDS-causing virus to be tested.
SAN FRANCISCO - The Little Hoover Commission on Friday said bureaucratic obstacles and a "lack of firm leadership, commitment and sense of direction" in the state's AIDS control effort have diluted the impact of California's $128 million in AIDS outlays.
MILL VALLEY, Calif. - After months of campaigning by students, a Marin County high school will become the first school in the state next week to offer condoms to the youngsters without notifying their parents.
An exhaustive national survey of intravenous drug users has confirmed the worst fears of public health officials concerning the role of addicts in the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. Even more important, the study strengthens the call for improved education and drug rehabilitation programs.
WASHINGTON - First Lady Barbara Bush offered a strong defense of private lives, including her own, saying Wednesday that she sympathizes with Wellesley College students who raised questions about her speaking at their graduation, but she thinks they don't understand "where I am coming from."
The National Commission on AIDS, in its second report issued Tuesday, continues to give sorely needed leadership to the nation's response to the epidemic. But the commission acknowledges that its efforts will not be enough unless President Bush himself does more.
SAN FRANCISCO - The sixth International Conference on AIDS will highlight "important strides"--but few if any breakthroughs--in AIDS research, prevention and care, organizers said Wednesday in unveiling the program for the gathering in June.
Shawn Hubler; Victor F. Zonana; Times Staff Writers
There is a man with AIDS who sleeps each night in an abandoned garage in Hawthorne. There is another who bunks at a Skid Row hotel--when he doesn't squander his disability check on crack.
WASHINGTON - A congressional hearing on legislation that would commit nearly $1.5 billion to the treatment of early-stage AIDS infections next year erupted Thursday into a debate over a proposal to require doctors to report the names of infected patients to health authorities.
Early tests of a potential AIDS vaccine show evidence of a human immune response that can fight off the AIDS virus, researchers at a San Diego firm report.
WASHINGTON - Bowing to unrelenting international pressure, the Bush Administration on Friday unveiled a special 10-day visa that does not require foreigners to declare whether they are infected with the AIDS virus.
WASHINGTON - A recent international conference on the status of AIDS drug research here drew an overflow crowd of hundreds of medical professionals. But by the final morning's session--one devoted to the infections that prey on people with immune systems laid waste by AIDS--the hall was virtually empty.
The battle with Alex began even before he reached the dentist's chair. The 22-year-old retarded man, who has Down's syndrome, took one terrified look at the bright overhead light and turned for the door.
President Bush recently made a most welcome commitment to passage of legislation barring discrimination against those infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.
SAN FRANCISCO - Moving to head off an embarrassing boycott of next June's international AIDS conference here, Rep. J. Roy Rowland (D-Ga.) on Wednesday introduced legislation that would give the secretary of health and human services the authority to liberalize restrictions on admitting foreigners infected with the AIDS virus.
A 28-year-old San Diego sailor was convicted of aggravated assault in military court Tuesday for infecting a former Navy woman with AIDS-causing virus when they had sex and he neglected to tell her he was a carrier of the virus.
The number of people developing AIDS in Los Angeles County has risen twice as fast in poor and minority communities as in more affluent areas--an observation that Los Angeles city AIDS officials attribute to unequal access to AIDS drugs.
Public health officials say a sizable refugee community and a growing number of people infected with the AIDS virus have caused tuberculosis cases in Long Beach to more than double, prompting a request for emergency funds to hold off an epidemic.
WASHINGTON - President Bush Thursday called on Americans to demonstrate compassion for people with AIDS and urged the House to approve legislation that would protect them from discrimination.
President Bush on Thursday will become the first American President to speak on AIDS to an AIDS conference, raising extraordinary expectations at a critical time in the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.
WILMINGTON, Mass. - The computer industry has been slumping for a year now. But Gary Cheek, engineering manager at a state-of-the-art semiconductor plant here, has a dream: a whole new manufacturing plant to match two already in operation. The cost? A cool $100 million.
SAN FRANCISCO - An international clamor over U.S. entrance restrictions on foreigners infected with the AIDS virus is fueling a growing movement to boycott the Sixth International Conference on AIDS, risking embarrassment for the United States and possibly setting back the global battle against the epidemic.
Malcolm Forbes, the flamboyant publisher known for his relationships with hot-air balloons and Elizabeth Taylor, had been dead only a week when rumors about his sexual orientation hit the mainstream media.
LONG BEACH - The Department of Health and Human Services will offer daily AIDS education and HIV testing in the department's Women, Infants and Children's Program and Prenatal Clinic as part of the third annual Los Angeles County Public Health Week. Activities will run April 2 to 7 with the theme "An Investment in the Future."
WASHINGTON - This would be the happiest time in Elizabeth Glaser's life if it were not the saddest. She is immersed in the flow of life and having a colossal effect on the world around her, yet this intense, driven woman and her family are fighting AIDS.
The resignation of Dr. Jonathan Mann as head of the World Health Organization's AIDS program is a serious blow to the global campaign to contain the AIDS epidemic. It inevitably raises questions about the leadership of Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, WHO director general since 1988.
The suggestion by two researchers that the AIDS epidemic has "crested" and will result in little more than 200,000 U.S. cases has reanimated the debate over the future course of one of the country's most pressing public health problems.
A former Navy woman, now infected with the AIDS-causing virus, testified during a military court hearing Wednesday that a male sailor infected her when they had sex and he neglected to tell her he was a carrier of the virus.
WASHINGTON - AIDS-infected persons could be eligible for promising but unproven experimental drugs at an earlier stage of the disease, according to the draft policy statement of a new federal program to provide access to drugs outside formal clinical trials.
Robert Steinbrook; Siok-Hian Tay; Times Staff Writers
A private appeal from the archbishop of Los Angeles for the archdiocese's 2,900 nuns and priests to volunteer for tests of an experimental AIDS vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk, the polio vaccine pioneer, was "premature" and made without Salk's knowledge, a key project researcher said Sunday.
An innovative "molecular scissors" that interferes with the infection of cells by the AIDS virus has been developed by researchers at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte.
SAN FRANCISCO - In an unusual end run around the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a small biotech company got the go-ahead Monday from California regulatory authorities to begin human testing within the state of a potential AIDS vaccine called HGP-30.
WASHINGTON - The Food and Drug Administration on Friday expanded approved uses of the antiviral drug AZT to include AIDS patients in the early stages of the disease and individuals who are infected with the AIDS virus but have not developed overt symptoms.
COSTA MESA - ICN Pharmaceuticals said Wednesday that it has ceased efforts to obtain approval to market ribavirin in the United States as a remedy against the AIDS virus and took a $71-million writedown in the fourth quarter, largely as a result of that decision.
Immune Response Corp., the La Jolla pharmaceutical company co-founded by Jonas Salk that is trying to develop an AIDS vaccine, said Wednesday that it has signed a licensing deal with French vaccine manufacturer Pasteur Vaccins and its parent, Institut Merieux, that could be worth up to $7.5 million over the next three years.
WASHINGTON - By the year 2000, the military could be facing a $3-billion health care crisis over AIDS within its ranks and has made no provisions to deal with it, according to a 2 1/2-year study by the General Accounting Office released Monday.
An investigation by a UCLA professor of medicine has found widespread use of clandestine AIDS testing by hospitals in the United States, a procedure that violates the law in many states, including California, and runs counter to standards of ethics and appropriate practice. The practice betrays an unwelcome panic among professionals regarding the disease.
WASHINGTON - Many hospitals in the nation are testing admitted patients for AIDS without their knowledge or consent, in some cases in violation of hospital policies or state laws, according to preliminary results from new research released Thursday.
SAN FRANCISCO - President Bush has declined an invitation to deliver a speech at the Sixth International Conference on AIDS here June 20-24, making it the first time in three years that the host nation's leader will not address the gathering.
UC San Diego's Medical Center, the U.S. Navy and the Veteran's Administration on Thursday unveiled a unique, federally funded facility that researchers will use to determine how the virus that causes AIDS affects the nervous system.
Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley has proposed a $25,000 city program to expand the distribution of bleach and condoms to the intravenous drug community, an important and useful extension of the efforts to contain the AIDS epidemic.
Alarms are being sounded about the perils of complacency regarding the AIDS pandemic. The new warnings come from the State AIDS Leadership Committee and the National AIDS Commission during meetings in Los Angeles.
Researchers at a new Palo Alto company have demonstrated for the first time that a strain of mice with human immune systems can be used as a rapid and effective preliminary screen for new drugs against AIDS.
WASHINGTON - A federal advisory panel on Tuesday recommended expanding the approved uses of the antiviral drug AZT to include AIDS patients in the early stages of the disease as well as those who are infected with the AIDS virus but have not yet developed outward symptoms.
To some of their gay friends, an acquaintance says, they are known as "the boring couple." When friends want to go out on the town, John Herbert and Douglas Good say no, they'd rather stay home. They like their privacy, Good explained.
The head of the National Commission on AIDS said Thursday the panel will seek emergency disaster relief money for the cities hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic because of inadequate federal, state and local funding.
"Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt" confronts us with the reality of AIDS with such simplicity and directness that it is hard to imagine how the enormous tragedy of this disease could be expressed with greater impact.
SAN DIEGO - The National Commission on AIDS is ignoring San Diego's "unique circumstances" during a three-day fact-finding session in Los Angeles that was designed to measure the extent of the public health crisis in Southern California, a San Diego County health officer said Thursday.
BANGKOK, Thailand - With his wacky sense of humor and flair for publicity, Mechai Viravaidya is regarded as something of a miracle worker for helping to rein in Thailand's booming population growth in a single generation. Now he's hoping to work a second miracle as he directs a nationwide campaign against AIDS.
New Federal Drug Administration dosage recommendations for AZT will facilitate the treatment of those with AIDS, a welcome development. But continued FDA delays on another crucial use of the same anti-viral drug are blocking life-extending treatment for thousands of others infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. That needs an urgent response.
SAN FRANCISCO - Last summer, researchers announced preliminary results of a pair of clinical trials that were expected to markedly change the way doctors used the drug AZT in the battle against AIDS.
SAN FRANCISCO - A blue-ribbon task force has advised Mayor Art Agnos that San Francisco must nearly double the $165 million a year now being spent on AIDS--largely to expand drug treatment--if the city's model care program is to avoid collapse in the 1990s.
New estimates of the numbers of people infected in the AIDS epidemic are lower than expected, a sign at least that education among homosexuals has changed behavior and reduced spread of the disease.
David Treadwell; Marlene Cimons; Times Staff Writers
NEW YORK - At a trial being closely watched by the nation's medical community and gay activists, the attorney for a doctor suffering from AIDS claimed in opening arguments Monday that the "young and brilliant physician" is suffering a "slow and tortuous death" because of the negligence of hospital officials and supervisors.
The slowing of the AIDS epidemic among gay men is continuing and is now being seen nationally beyond Los Angeles County, San Francisco and New York City, the metropolitan areas hit earliest and hardest by acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
Paul Rosas and Ronny Alvarado were out trawling for hypes in a wild pocket of downtown Los Angeles, carrying the message about AIDS and dirty needles to an urban prairie where an addict can get high for as little as 25 cents.
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