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In just a few weeks it will begin arriving in millions of American homes, sealed with a perforated tear-off strip. "This is the first time in history," said Secretary of Health and Human Services Otis Bowen last week, "that the Government has tried to contact virtually every resident directly by mail regarding a public health crisis." At a cost of $17 million, the eight-page booklet on AIDS will be mailed to 107 million U.S. households starting May 26. Explains the principal author, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop: "We are taking this step because the epidemic of misunderstanding about how AIDS is spread and how it is not spread seems, at times, as difficult to control as the epidemic itself."

Like Koop's straight-shooting AIDS report released in 1986, the HHS primer, which is geared to the reading level of seventh-graders, does not mince words. "No matter what you may have heard, the AIDS virus is hard to get and is easily avoided," the pamphlet says. "You won't get AIDS from clothes, a telephone or from a toilet seat." Instead, the virus is transmitted by "sharing drug needles and syringes; anal sex, with or without a condom; and vaginal or oral sex with someone who shoots drugs or engages in anal sex."

So far, reaction to the pamphlet, which is called Understanding AIDS and is also published in Spanish, has been largely positive. Some groups are sure to be offended by its blunt explicitness and its hearty endorsement of condoms. Republican Congressman William Dannemeyer of California calls portions of the report "irresponsible and unscientific." Most health officials, however, have praised the effort. At least no one who bothers to read the booklet can any longer plead ignorance about one of the nation's biggest health problems.