San Francisco Chronicle - Sunday, June 4, 2006

The Centers for Disease Control mandated that all health-care workers start wearing latex gloves all the time any patient contact was done. If we didn't follow the mandate, we could be verbally counseled, written up, monetarily fined, or worse, fired for not following the new guidelines. We had no choice but to do what we were told. I did it so I could continue to give care to those who needed it.

My very last day at work, before I moved up north, I had an airplane pilot, who survived the crash of his small plane, as a critical patient. Then a very sick, end-stage AIDS patient, who needed immediate attention, arrived. I took him as my patient and let someone else treat the pilot. I was glad I spent my time with him, as he died the next day.

My compassion from the '80s was soon replaced with anger in the mid- '90s as I acquired a life-altering allergy to natural rubber latex proteins from wearing the mandated toxic gloves. The CDC knew there would be a certain percentage of health-care workers who would get this allergy, 15 percent by now. They didn't tell any of us about the potential hazard, just threatened us if we didn't wear the gloves.

So my life has been impacted forever by the AIDS crisis on a level no one really knows or cares about. I have no regrets for the patients I cared for, just anger that they kept a secret from the nurses on the front line.

We are the silent casualties of the AIDS war and have been forgotten. No one will ever tally up our losses and publish them.

PEGGY ROURKE-NICHOLS, R.N.

Arnold (Calaveras County)

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Editor -- Twenty-five years ago, I had not yet heard of AIDS. Fifteen years ago, I watched one of my dearest friends, a gifted choreographer and ballet director, die of this terrible disease; no one could do anything to help him except to turn up the morphine and speed him on his way. Later that year, I lost a former drama student, who was just hitting his stride in the entertainment world. A well-loved young man, who worked across the hall from my ballet director friend and me, and used to maintain a little garden in front of our funky old Lincoln Arts Building in west side Santa Rosa, followed his long-time partner into the grim world of AIDS fatalities. No one kept up the garden after Marc died.

In the early 1990s, our family shared in the mourning as members of the Oregon Shakespeare Company were lost to AIDS. It seemed as if AIDS was reaching into all the places where beauty was reverenced and plucking out the most gifted.

Nowadays, thanks to some "miracle'' drugs, HIV is no longer an automatic death sentence, at least here in the United States, but there seems to be no stopping it in Africa. I wonder if it can be stopped. Certainly it would help if some religious leaders would combine compassion with common sense, promote condom use and stop preaching hellfire and damnation. Also, the younger generation in our own country needs to be better-educated or we're going to see a new, perhaps more dangerous, wave of the disease.

MEG ROSENFELD

San Francisco

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Editor -- Has my view of AIDS changed in the past 25 years? You bet it has. I was diagnosed HIV-positive back in the summer of 1987. When I heard the news, I was devastated. I was in a relationship and feared I had infected my partner with a terrible disease. I had planned to commit suicide if she turned up positive and was sure she would after four years of unprotected sex. To my amazement, she was negative and that issue was resolved, but I was to face more challenges.

I was told I had basically five years, at the most, to live, and to get my affairs in order and prepare for a slow, horrible death. I was immediately put on drugs to "slow the progression" to AIDS. After a few years of taking the drugs and waiting to die, I came across the views of some world-class "dissident" scientists (Nobel laureates among them) who challenge the official version of AIDS being caused by a retrovirus called HIV.

I went to my doctor and talked to him about the group of scientists and asked if I should go off my meds, because they were making me sick.

He told me they were crazy and if I went off my meds I'd be dead in a year. Well, I went off the meds and here I am, 14 years later, the picture of health. I make it through flu season without so much as a sniffle. I'm not encouraging people to go off their meds, however, just because it worked for me.

What I am saying is there needs to be a rethinking of what exactly causes this disease because there are too many inconsistencies in the orthodox theory. Science should be an open forum rather than simple dogma passed out to the masses just because one side has all the PR and funding.

I've come to realize that AIDS is not actually a disease, but rather a category or umbrella, if you will, under which every disease throughout the world that existed long before the AIDS era can be placed, if merely in the presence of a positive antibody test for HIV.

Example: TB without a positive HIV test is just simply TB. But accompanied by a positive antibody test it's called AIDS.

And the tests are confusing. There's no gold standard for them. Example: One can test positive in the United States and negative in Australia because each country has its own criteria for what "HIV positive" is. We all wait and pray for the end of this terrible syndrome, but I've come to believe it will come not in a laboratory, but in a courtroom instead.

MARK PORTIER

San Francisco
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