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EDITOR’S NOTE

THE AIDS PLAGUE UPDATED
By Ruth Miller Fitzgibbons |

It’s funny how a new decade seems to define itself right away, and the Nineties are proving to be no exception. In the area of public crises, drugs are already eclipsing AIDS as the number one target of mass fear and outrage.

Both are debilitating menaces, and one should not crowd out the other as a major communal concern. But folks on the front lines of the fight against AIDS say that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s been nine years since the AIDS virus was discovered, three years since Randy Shilts’s seminal book, And the Band Played On, four or five years since an all-out education effort sought to convince people that AIDS could not be transmitted on a toilet seal. Sadly, many people are just tired of talking about it.

Still, thousands are dying of AIDS each year. And the effort to help them continues to be fraught with emotional and political baggage. A case in point was the recent, shameful refusal of the state Health Department to allocate funds to the AIDS Resource Center because the organization catered to openly gay men. Are we so blinded by prejudice that we would deny services and support to the segment of the AIDS population-homosexuals-that needs it most? (The position was later reversed under pressure by Attorney General Jim Mattox.)

Whether this community’s response to AIDS has been mere lip service, as the Dallas Gay Alliance has charged, or a model for other cities, as the county health department claims, depends, obviously, on your point of view. Of the two-hundred-some-odd recommendations returned by a task force appointed two years ago by County Judge Lee Jackson, relatively few new initiatives have emerged. Rather, progress of varying degrees is reported on a number of ongoing programs, from a decent stab at AIDS education (implemented in most public, but few private schools) to a more disappointing show on the legislative front. Efforts to beef up anti-discrimination laws failed on both a local and state level, and an attempt to expand Medicaid coverage was rebuffed by the state legislature last session. As Dr. P.O’B. Montgomery Jr., who chaired the group, admits, responding to the AIDS crisis is “a very difficult and slow-moving process.”

It was two years ago this month that D spent one week chronicling the ways in which Dallas had been touched by AIDS. An update, of sorts:

Ann Ellison, the mother with AIDS who graced our cover, died on April 28, 1988.

Don Flaigg, a member of the Episcopal Church of Saint Thomas, died in January of 1989.

The Rev. Ted Karpf, pastor at Saint Thomas and one of the community’s first clergymen to minister to AIDS patients, resigned in September 1988, citing “burnout.”

Mike Richards, co-founder of the AIDS Resource Center, moved to Hawaii to live out his life, then was accused of a bank robbery and later exonerated in a bizarre case of mis-taken identity. He died on October 20, 1989.

Dr. Daniel Barbaro resigned as director of Parkland Memorial Hospital’s AIDS clinic on May 25, 1988.

Lindsey, a ten-month-old baby who was one of two pediatric AIDS patients being seen by Dr. Richard Wasserman, is “holding her own.”

Margaret Gallimore, a nurse who has turned her home into a hospice for the bedridden, received a citation from President Reagan on June 10, 1988.

Jack Hayes, a fitness buff who taught aerobics to fellow PWAs (Persons With Aids), died on September 27, 1988.

Dr. Terry Pulse, a Grand Prairie family practitioner with a large caseload of AIDS patients, became the subject of critical news accounts questioning his experimental treatments and exposing an investigation by the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners.

Patrick Debenport, the savings and loan employee who admitted embezzling $175,000 for the fledgling PWA house in Oak Cliff, is serving a prison sentence in Fort Worth.

And the band played on.

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