AIDS lecture April 7, 1987
Address by C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD
Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service and
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health
Department of Health and Human Services
Presented to the University of Pennsylvania Chapter of Alpha Omega Alpha
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
April 7, 1987
It was only one day since I had spoken in the same city at the same University when I introduced the Surgeon General's Workshop on Pediatric AIDS. The previous day's lecture had been in the auditorium of the Children's Hospital; this venue was in a classroom of the University Hospital. The audience of an AOA lecture is usually chiefly students, but because of the interest of everyone in AIDS, as well as the paucity of information available, this audience was also filled with faculty and university employees.
Unlike the previous day's lecture, I did not confine myself to pediatric AIDS, but tried to cover the subject completely from start to finish and I think I succeeded. However, that means that most of the material in this lecture is repetitious of things said in the last five or six AIDS lectures and I will not repeat them in this introduction.
The only new fact that I presented to this audience was the recent finding that researchers had found that cervical secretions also contain the virus and studies on transmission via that source were in progress. Although not new material, I talked about the safety of the blood supply for transfusion in a different way. I told about the discovery of the blood test for AIDS which measured the antibodies to the virus and pointed out that prior to this test the AIDS virus was turning up in something like 4 units of every 10 thousand units of blood collected. Today we estimate that the virus might be present in not more than 4 or 5 units out of every million units collected. There are very few processes in the public health arena that come anywhere near to that close to perfection.
Abstinence
AIDS education
The mysteries of AIDS
Blood test for the virus in the blood supply
Cervical secretions
Children born with AIDS
Condoms
Demography of AIDS
Fundamental values of personal freedom, mutual assistance, and national unity
Gonorrhea
Growth of international biomedical researchers
Hepatitis
Heterosexual transmission
History of AIDS
Homosexual and bisexual men
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)
Incubation period
Inter-generational chain of infection
International system of epidemiological reporting
Interpretation and misinterpretation of the facts about AIDS
Inter-sexual chain of infection
Intravenous drug abusers
Mutually faithful monogamy relationships
Nature of homosexuality & I.V. drug abuse
Parents as sex educators
Partition of AIDS in Blacks and Hispanics
Partitions of congenital AIDS in Blacks and Hispanics
Predictions through statistics for 1991
Sex education
Sex education as a state and community responsibility
Statistics by cities
Statistics by states
Syphilis
Transmission of AIDS
Value of education in AIDS
Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention
Lee Iacocca
National Coalition of Black & Lesbian Gays
National Education Association
National PTA
State Boards of Education
Surgeon General's Report on AIDS
Synagogue Council of America
Washington Business Group on Health