The State - News from March 7, 1988

U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop told about 2,500 school administrators meeting in Anaheim that students and teachers with AIDS pose no danger to public health. “From a public health point of view, there is no reason to exclude such a person,” Koop told members of the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals at the Anaheim Convention Center. Koop said frank explanations about how acquired immune deficiency syndrome is contracted and how it can be avoided, which parents and teachers are “morally obligated” to offer students, create another moral dilemma. “It’s not possible--and it certainly isn’t easy--to discuss AIDS without also discussing sexual intercourse, and several varieties of intercourse at that,” he said. “. . . This has been the most difficult part of the AIDS epidemic: having to tell young people the facts about personal and sexual relationships in the context of a horrible, fatal disease.”