AIDS Lecture November 30, 1987
14/2
Address by C. Everett Koop, MD, ScD
Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Presented to the 9th Annual National Media Conference
New York, New York
November 30, 1987
It had been seven days since I last addressed a public audience on the subject of AIDS.
Things were not happening with great rapidity this far out from the beginning of the epidemic in a seven day period to warrant much new material in this presentation. Therefore it is a shortened version of the address given to the Association of Government Communicators on the 20th on November, just ten days before.
I gave statistics as of June -- the latest accurate ones we had with 44,000 people afflicted by AIDS with 26,000 deaths.
Even on the occasions when I presented a lecture that was largely a repetition of something given before, I tried to add new wrinkles. In this one I did that by comparing some of concerns about AIDS, and pointing out how successful we had been in the past 25 years in defeating or controlling dozens of serious menaces to the public health such as small pox, polio, sickle cell anemia, hypertension, lead poisoning, German measles and so on. That was one of the reasons that the public is convinced that science is magic and magic is science and together they can do anything.
Because of the nature of this presentation no index is provided.