On The Ballot: Guns and AIDS

CALIFORNIA

Should HIV Carriers Have Secrets?

Every time Californians go to the polls, they are buried under a blizzard of ballot initiatives. This year they face 29 items that would do everything from cut auto-insurance rates to raise cigarette taxes. But none of the lot has aroused greater emotion than Proposition 102, which would abruptly shift the state away from the policies that have put California in the forefront of the fight against AIDS. It would make compulsory what has always been voluntary: the reporting and tracking of people who have had intimate contact with carriers of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.

Sponsored by the antitax crusader Paul Gann, who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion, and Orange County Republican Congressman William Dannemeyer, the initiative would compel physicians, surgeons, blood banks and test sites to report to public health offices anybody turning up with the HIV virus. Moreover, reporting would be mandatory if there were merely "reasonable cause to believe" a person was infected. HIV carriers would be required to provide authorities with the names of those they might have caught the virus from or passed it to. Dannemeyer, who supported an earlier, unsuccessful ballot proposition requiring the quarantine of AIDS patients, says he backs 102 because "we have a duty to know whether we have a fatal disease coursing through our veins, and we have a duty not to transmit it to another human being."

Opponents argue that homosexuals and drug users who now get tested for HIV only because they are assured of confidentiality would be scared off by Proposition 102. Says David Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley: "If you push hard enough, people won't come into the clinics." Moreover, some opponents suspect that the "reasonable cause to believe" provision would encourage the reporting of people simply because they appear gay.

Despite strong early support, Proposition 102 is now rated a toss-up. Proposition 96, a less controversial initiative that would allow courts to order HIV tests for those charged with sex and assault crimes, is leading by a considerable margin. Even if both measures are rejected, however, the crusade ! against AIDS victims is likely to resurface when another election rolls around.