The Kids Both Gore and Bush Ignore

by Steve Chapman

Every year, hundreds of infants are born infected with HIV. They get it from their mothers -- most of whom got it by injecting drugs with contaminated syringes, or by having sex with an injecting drug user. So if you want to protect children from AIDS, you have to find a way to prevent transmission via hypodermic needles.

That's not so hard to do. Amazingly enough, addicts don't really prefer dirty syringes. They use them only because restrictive laws make clean ones hard to get or expensive. So in the early years of the epidemic, AIDS activists came up with an idea: Give drug users sterile needles in exchange for their old ones.

If you can't stop people from injecting drugs, the thinking went, maybe you can at least stop them from getting and transmitting the virus. That would save not just their lives, but the lives of their sexual partners and their future offspring.

Hard-line drug warriors scoffed, insisting this approach would merely encourage illicit drug use while having no effect on the HIV infection rate. On both counts, they were wrong.

In one scientific study after another, needle exchange has proven its value. In 1997, the federal National Institutes of Health declared, "There is no longer any doubt that these programs work." By its estimate, needle exchange can reduce HIV infections among drug users by 30 percent.

Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala eventually reached the same conclusion. "A meticulous scientific review has now proven that needle exchange programs can reduce the transmission of HIV and save lives without losing ground in the battle against illegal drugs," she said in 1998 -- thus meeting the two conditions specified by law for federal funding of such efforts.

But the Clinton administration steadfastly refused to provide any funding. And the Republican Congress, to emphasize its disdain for needle exchange, passed a measure prohibiting the District of Columbia government from implementing this solution, even with non-federal money.

Obstinacy, however, hasn't solved the problem. Nearly 60 percent of AIDS cases among women can be blamed on drug use or sex with a drug user. Each year, 300 to 400 infants emerge from the womb afflicted by this lethal virus. Many of these victims could have been spared by the simplest of preventives: a clean syringe.

The Republican convention gave a prominent speaking spot to Patricia Funderburk Ware, head of the Family Well-Being Foundation and an advocate of sex education that stresses abstinence. Ware said we need to "insure that not one more American, especially an innocent newborn baby, has to live with this awful disease."

But she never said a word about dirty needles -- which is like talking about obesity without mentioning food. There's nothing wrong with promoting sexual abstinence among adolescents, but the infants with HIV didn't get it because they were promiscuous. They got it because one of their parents used a syringe that was fatally contaminated with the virus.

So advocates of needle exchange shouldn't expect anything from a Republican administration -- or from a Democratic one. In this front of the AIDS war, President Clinton has been a conscientious objector, spending his entire term finding reasons not to act. Gore is somewhat more promising: He reportedly advised Clinton to lift the ban, and in a private meeting with two AIDS activists at the 1996 Democratic convention, he said he supported federal funding.

But Wayne Turner, a spokesman for ACT UP Washington, one of those who met with the vice president, dismisses that statement. "Please emphasize that I don't believe him," he says. "I have absolutely no faith in this administration, including Gore."

Selling needle exchange to the American people as the best way to protect infants from AIDS would not be that hard, since that's exactly what it is. Besides stemming the epidemic without fostering drug use, these programs make perfect fiscal sense. A new syringe costs less than 8 cents. Treating a patient with AIDS costs about $150,000.

You would think one of the two candidates would embrace needle exchange simply because it would save the lives of blameless children. But neither has, and neither is about to. So maybe they could agree on a joint slogan: Some children left to die.