Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1983. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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The New York Times - July 3, 1983
Philip Shenon
The group, the International AIDS Task Force, said Federal studies showing Haitians to be at risk were wrong. Haitians with AIDS usually contracted the disorder through homosexual contact, as did most other victims, according to members of the private group, made up of Haitian-American doctors and AIDS specialists in the United States and elsewhere.
More than 1,600 cases of AIDS have been reported nationally by the national Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Of the victims, the agency said, 71 percent were homosexual or bisexual men, 17 percent were intravenous drug users and about 5 percent were Haitians living in the United States.
The Centers for Disease Control said two-thirds of the Haitians were neither homosexual nor bisexual, a figure that the 18-member task force said it did not believe. Economic Suffering for Haitians
At the news conference held at the Halloran House hotel, at 525 Lexington Avenue, the group said Haitians had suffered economically because of their purported link to the disorder, which leaves its victims highly vulnerable to a wide range of fatal illnesses.
"We want to show that there is nothing in the genetic makeup of Haitians that causes them to get the disease," said Dr. Mathilde Krim, a member of the group and head of the Interferon Laboratory at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Reserch.
She said she believed that when researchers from the Centers for Disease Control asked Haitians with AIDS if they were homosexual, most of them lied and said they were not. "There is a very strong taboo against homosexuality in Haiti, much stronger than in the United States," she said. Evidence Not Available
When the statistics were compiled, she said, they showed incorrectly that the groups at risk included Haitians. Donald Berreth, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control, said the agency would stand by its studies. "It would be nice if we had evidence suggesting that Haitians were not at increased risk," he said, "but that evidence is not yet available."
Other members of the task force called for international research to see if AIDS might be produced by tropical diseases common not only to Haiti but also to other developing nations.
Members of the group, which met yesterday for the first time, included representatives of the Association of Haitian Physicians Abroad, the Rockefeller Foundation and scientists from Northwestern University and the University of Paris.
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