AIDS Lecture October 15, 1987
AIDS and the Social Order
Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Presented to the Washington Forum
Washington, DC
October 15, 1987
It has been two day since I spoke in Chicago to the Allstate Foundation Forum on public issues.
The Washington Forum is a group of distinguished economists, investors, and others with special concerns for the world and its business, and I thanked them for adding AIDS to that year's agenda, but also for asking me to share with them my perception of the social, economic, and cultural effects might be of the epidemic of AIDS. I then began reviewing for the audience in a brief manner some of the difficult choices that might le ahead for the leaders of the nations around the world.
This lecture really pulls the high points out of the lecture given in Tokyo and the Allstate lecture given in Chicago. This combination was appropriate in my mind because these were businessmen with international concerns and they were businessmen facing the same sort of worksite implications of AIDS, as did the Allstate group.
Indeed, this is about as brief a summary as I could imagine putting together of the two previous lectures in this archives.
There were no new statistics and no new concepts given in the lecture, but at about this time it was clear that an extraordinary percentage of the American people now knew that there was such a thing as AIDS -- 98 to 99 per cent, some polls showed. A third of the public, however, is still unclear about the way the disease is transmitted. They are correct about homosexual sex practices and shared needles, but incorrect about toilet seats, sneezing, coughing, food handling, and kissing.
AIDS & economics
AIDS & ethics
AIDS & morality
AIDS & social cohesion
AIDS & the ethical foundation of health care in US
AIDS & the law
AIDS in countries not as well prepared as the US
Blood test for AIDS
Case load of AIDS as reported by the United Nations & the case load of AIDS in the United States
Confidentiality of blood test results
Cost of caring for AIDS patients
Difficult choices that lie ahead
Effect of AIDS patients in hospitals on admissions
Effect of AIDS patients in hospitals on choice of residency programs
Embarrassment of AIDS & the reasons therefore
Future caseload of AIDS
Future cost of AIDS
Heterosexuality
Homosexuality
Lack of a vaccine for AIDS
Neurologic AIDS & its effect upon qualifications for some jobs
Partition of AIDS among the young, the Blacks & the Hispanics
Polls on AIDS awareness
Public's perception on how you do and do not get AIDS
Refusal of professionals to treat some persons with AIDS
Risk to health professions on a transfer of the AIDS virus
Risk to the health professions
By C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD
And Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health