Panel: `Fear, bigotry’ affecting AIDS care

WASHINGTON — An “epidemic of fear and bigotry” prevents many rural Americans infected with the AIDS virus from getting needed care, the National Commission on Aids said in a report Tuesday.

The commission also said too few minorities, women and children are included in experimental-drug testing and that too many physicians and dentists still won’t treat people with AIDS.

“We have to do much better to educate everybody to this durable new threat (of AIDS) in our environment,” said Dr. June Osborn, chairwoman of the 15-member commission that advises Congress and the White House.

The report was the commission’s third, and as with the earlier two, the panel emphasized the urgency of the situation and called for “swift action.”

“We’re very late in responding to a massive problem, but getting later makes no sense at all,” said Osborn, dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

The report said that “in rural America, there is an epidemic of fear and bigotry, fanned by the absence of education and knowledge,” surrounding AIDS and the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, that causes the disease.

Panel members, who earlier this year went to Georgia and Texas to learn about the impact of AIDS, said education about the disease is “virtually non-existent and desperately needed in rural communities.”

The report described the experiences of people who had been rejected by their church, lost their jobs and were evicted from their apartments because of their AIDS infection.

“Ignorance and misinformation are seriously hampering, if not crippling efforts to treat” rural Americans with AIDS, it said.