Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1989. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - Tuesday, June 6, 1989
David Perlman
Joseph said that in the future, when cures are available for AIDS, he would support required reporting to health authorities of those infected with the AIDS virus so they can receive counseling and their sexual contacts can be traced. When that time comes, he said, there is no reason that AIDS should not be treated like any communicable disease, such as tuberculosis. Joseph outlined the changing distribution of victims in New York, noting that, at the beginning of the epidemic, 73 percent of the reported cases involved men having sex with men; today that proportion is only 42 percent.
In 1981, 22 percent of the AIDS cases struck intravenous drug users, but by now that proportion has doubled. The crack epidemic - with so many women trading sex for the drug - is taking its own grim toll, and Joseph reported that roughly 1,800 infants are now being born to HIV infected mothers. All these trends, with AIDS aiming more and more at "minorities, poor drug-ravaged neighborhoods, and hospitals serving those people," will accelerate in coming years, Joseph warned.
By 1993, he predicted, 60,000 people will have developed AIDS in America's largest city and 48,000 people will have died. The cost of care will reach at least $7 billion a year, he said. These numbers are far larger than San Francisco's, where "only" 4,297 people have died of AIDS, and needle-sharing or the sex-for-drugs trade is far less widespread.
San Francisco is far different in size, yet what New York's health commissioner predicted for his city could indicate that within the coming decade San Francisco's numbers too will loom as desperately.
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