The Washington Blade, July 15, 1983

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July 15, 1983 lk Vol. 14, No. 28 - 500 Outside of D.C./Baltimore Areas
Named in ethics committee report
THE GAY WEEKLY OF THE NATION'S CAPITAL
Rep. Gerry Studds becomes first
member of Congress to come out
by Lou Chibbaro Jr.
Gay rights leaders said Rep. Gerry E.
Studds (D-Ma.) acted with courage and
dignity yesterday when he declared on
the floor ofthe House of Representatives
that he is Gay.
Studds made his announcement, in a
brief but dramatic speech, following the
. release earlier in the day of a report by
the House ethics committee, which
named hirdas having engaged in a sexual
relationship with a "16 or 17-year-old"
congressional page in 1973 and as having
made "sexual advances" to two other
pages that same year.
The report, prepared by committee
counsel Joseph Califano also said Rep.
Daniel B. Crane (R-I11.) engaged in a
'sexual relationship with a 17-year-old
female page in 1980 and page supervisor
James C. Howarth had a , sexual
relationship with another female page,
also 17, in 1979 and 198(1.
"The Allegations which have been
- directed against me center on a brief
relationship which Vegan ond ended ten
years ago, Studds told his colleagues,
who listened in dead silence.
"I do not seek to contest the existence
of that relationship, which without
question reflected a very serious error in
judgment on my part," he said.
But he added that the relationship was
completely voluntary and did not
involve coercion or preferential treat-ment.
Based on Califano's and the staff's
recommendation, the committee voted
by secret ballot 11 to 1 to urge the full
House to approve a"reprimand" against
both Studds and Crane.
Studds 'rushed out of the Capitol
Building immediately after making his
statement and was driven away by staff
aides. Peter Fleischer, Studds' chief of
staff, said the congressman would make
no additional remarks to the press at
least until Congress begins business
again on Tuesday.
Fleischer noted, however, that Studds
has "no plans whatsoever to resign."
Califano stated in the committee
report that a number of other allegations
of sexual misconduct between members
of Congress and pages were "thoro-ughly"
investigated and found to be
baseless.
Studds' statements were supported by
the committee report, which included
portions of a transcript of an interview
between committee investigators and
the page with whom he had the sexual
affair.
_ The former page, now 27, told
STUDDS: blasts ethics panel.
committee investigators that he doesn't
consider himself Gay and that he would
have preferred his relationship with
Studds to be nonsexual.
He added, however, that Studds did
"nothing to me that I would consider
destructive or painful" and "I thought
that he provided me with one of the more
Continued on page 11
AIDS reported in 4 health workers
by Steve Martz
The federal Centers for Disease
Control reported today that they have
confirmed four cases of AIDS among
health care workers who are not known
to belong to any of the groups at high risk
for developing AIDS.
j
BRANDT: reportedly downplays
significance .of cases.
Although federal officials immediately
sought to downplay the significance of
the report, published in today's issue of
the CD C's Morbidity and Mortality
Weekly Report, it comes after health
authorities have repeatedly asserted that
one strong indication that AIDS is not
spread by casual contact is the fact that
no health care worker had contracted the
disease.
_ "There is nothing in this report to
change our opinion that AIDS is not
about to break out in the general
population5" said a spokeswoman in the
Department of Health and Human
Services' press office.
That position was reportedly echoed
by the nation's top health officer,
Assistant Secretary for Health Dr.
Edward Brandt.
"In 'Dr. Brandt's] judgment, this
does not alter the basic proposition that
no health provider has contracted AIDS
by direct contact with AIDS patients,"
said an aide to HHS Secretary Margaret
Heckler. The aide said he was present
when Brandt briefed Heckler about
today's report.
Branch himself could not be reached
for comment.
The four cases reported in MMWR
involved a housekeeper in Baltimore's
Sinai Hospital, a New jersey hospital
laundry worker, a Miami private nurse,
and an aide in the outpatient clinic of a
New York City hospital. All but the New
Jersey laundry worker were men, and all
denied belonging to one of the high risk
groups—homosexual men with multiple
sex partners, IV drug users, recent
Haitian immigrants to this country, and
hemophiliacs.
However, there were strong indica-tions
that authorities were unwilling to
rule out the possibility that some or all of
the four may have belonged to a high risk
group.
"They denied belonging to known
AIDS risk groups," MMWR reported
in an editorial note accompanying its
presentation of the four cases, "however,
the accuracy of data concerning sexual
activity and -IV drug use cannot be
verified. None gave a history of caring
for an AIDS patient, and none had
known contact with blood of an AIDS
patient; however, the possibility that
these patients had forgotten or unknown
exposure to the blood of AIDS patients
cannot be excluded."
The HHS press spokeswoman was
more direct "We have reason to think
none of them have been totally
forthcoming about their backgrounds."
Both the Baltimore man and the New
Continued on page 12
Researchi
Al • Sr. an
overview
by Margot Joan Fromer
First of two articles
It's said that whoever solves the AIDS
mystery will have to buy a new suit of
evening clothes for the Nobel Prize
ceremony. There's no shortage of people
who'd like to be there, and they're trying
like crazy to find answers, but there
hasn't been much real progress.
AIDS research is done in two basic
ways: looking for the reason why the
immune system goes so spectacularly
out of whack and trying to find a way to
reconstitute it, that is, to cure the
disease. There is some overlap in these
two areas of research, and it is not
necessarily true that finding the answer
to one .problem will automatically solve
the other.
For example, suppose that someone
could show that this or that virus attacks
the cells of the immune system and
causes the helper T cells to die, thus giv-ing
the suppressor cells unfair advantage.
' This would be a phenomenal discovery,
but it would not answer all the questions,
nor would it guarantee that a cure would
be close at hand. Most researchers do in
fact think it is a virus, which is a
particularly grim possibility because
viruses are notoriously hard to kill.
Proving a causal relationship between
an agent and a disease poses procedural
problems that AIDS researchers have
' yet to surmount. And—what if it's net
, virus that's causing this mystery ail-ment?
What if it's either another
infectious agent or something else
entirely? What if it's a mutation of an
already existing microorganism or even a
brand new life form? It takes years of
painstaking and expensive research to
isolate and identify new life forms, and
even then no one may know n hat the
discovery means.
Take the human T cell leukemia virus
(HTLV) for example. A grand hoopla
was made in the press in mid-May about
the discovery of this virus in some 1, very
few) AIDS patients. Then the excite-ment
died down, and scientists went
back to their laboratories to try to figure
out what it meant.
The May 20 Science, the official
publication of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science,
' contained the reports of four indepen-dent
studies of HTLV and AIDS
patients.
The first, by Essex, Cabradilla, and
Francis compared serum samples from
patients with AIDS and samples from
controls (people who do not have the
disease being studied but who are
matched for physical and lifestyle
characteristics). Essex, et. al. were look-ing
for evidence of antibodies associated
with HTLF. They found what they were
looking for in 19 out of 75 of the AIDS
patients and in 2 out of 336 controls.
Continued 012 page 25