Wise Up, II

To the Editors of the Crimson:

There is no way of determining at present who is a 'carrier' of AIDS, in the sense of being a person from whom one would be more likely to contract AIDS. There is a test to determine if AIDS antibodies are present in a person's immune system, which means that a person has been exposed to AIDS, but that does not mean that a person has contracted AIDS or that he is capable of passing it on to another person. Very little is also known about what makes people susceptible to this disease; the vast majority of people exposed to it do not contract it.

In any case, the quarantine' of hundreds of thousands of people is impossible. If it were known that such a quarantine were to take place, people would refuse, naturally, to be tested, and those who did not would be quarantined to no effect in controlling the disease, and, as I have pointed out above, possibly for no reason at all.

Quarantine is an outrage of human rights. The pseudo-historical analysis in your editorial of December 17, which attempts to reduce the importance of human dignity and freedom to a relative issue, is a falsification. People who understand the nature of AIDS--by which I mean all scientists connected with disciplined research on the subject--oppose the idea of a quarantine. The only people who support it are journalists, politicians, and other inadequately informed people.

We who have seen our friends die of AIDS believe the opinion expressed in the editorial of December 17 to be a cruel, ignorant and fatuous incitement to useless and destructive panic. By publishing such an article, the Crimson lowers itself to the level of the National Enquirer. Where is your sense of human decency? Gary Ralph