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America's most unsung sleuths may well be the staff members of the Centers for Disease Control. In the opinion of Atlanta Bureau Chief Joseph Boyce, who spent more than two weeks reporting the activities of the Government's CDC for this week's cover stories, the agency is responsible for Americans' receiving the best protection in the world against such sudden and unexpected killers as toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaire's disease and swine flu. Boyce, who talked with CDC administrators, epidemic intelligence-service officers and public health officers, was doubly impressed by the agency...
...shook hands with AIDS victims and sat at their bedsides. Said Heckler: "What's just as bad as the disease is the fear of the disease. The fear has become irrational." Explains Dr. James Curran, head of the AIDS task force at Atlanta's Centers for Disease Control (CDC): "For a person not in a known risk group, the risk is not only minimal but likely to remain minimal. It apparently is not spread through routine contact or through respiration, like the flu." Indeed, none of the hundreds of health-care workers who have treated patients have been infected...
Nevertheless, Heckler stressed to the patients that "AIDS is our No. 1 health concern and the epidemic is our No. 1 priority." Her department, which includes CDC and NIH, is spending $14 million on AIDS research this year and requesting $12 million more. Some gay activists have charged that the Reagan Administration is neglecting AIDS because it primarily affects homosexuals. (In fact, the money allocated to AIDS research so far is greater than the $20 million spent over eight years on toxic shock syndrome and Legionnaire's disease.) Heckler's department also publishes a biweekly bulletin reporting the findings...
...determine the future progress of the epidemic, the CDC has launched an intensive investigation into the 6% of the victims (69 men, women and children) who do not appear to fit into any of the at-risk categories. About a third of these people "will remain unknown," says Curran; they died before CDC investigators could question them. But five are women whose husbands or lovers are drug addicts, suggesting that AIDS may be transmitted through heterosexual relations. Should that prove to be true, female partners of bisexual men are also at risk. Indeed, says Curran, one such woman...
...blood-borne diseases because they depend on vast quantities of a blood byproduct to control their bleeding. A year's supply of the substance, known as anti-hemophiliac factor concentrate (AHF), comes from the blood of 25,000 to 75,000 donors. In the past year the CDC has also received alarming reports of about eight cases of suspected AIDS in nonhemophiliac blood recipients. Four cases had received donor blood after open-heart surgery; a fifth was a hysterectomy patient. In a sixth case, that of a baby in San Francisco who had required several transfusions, some...