AIDS in the Work Place, a school lesson produced by Health and Welfare, Canada for senior students, teaches fifteen erroneous statements in a twenty-minute lesson.
B.C. teens who tested positive for the AIDS virus totaled 88 in 1989, nearly double the 45 found in 1988. Deputy health minister Stan Dubas stated, “B.C. teenagers think they’re immune to AIDS.”
B.C. teens think that they’re immune to AIDS because that is what they are taught in school. The following examples are from the lesson:
Lesson
(mouth-to-mouth resuscitation)
“It’s been said the amount of virus that you’d have to get from saliva would require that you’d be in contact with four litres of saliva and that’s a lot of mouth-to-mouth or a lot of passionate kissing. It just isn’t a practical consideration.
Fact
Current U.S. Food and Drug Administration and World Health Organization guidelines to individuals who have had a positive blood test showing antibodies to the AIDS virus specially recommend that infected individuals refrain from intimate kissing.
Fact
AIDS virus has been cultured out of the saliva of infected individuals, and HCW’s (Health Care Workers) have been instructed to use disposable airway equipment or resuscitation bags during mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Although HCW’s are protected from the danger of salivary transmission, B.C. teens are taught “it just isn’t a practical consideration.”
Lesson
The AIDS virus is very difficult to catch.
Occupational transmission of the AIDS virus to HCW’s has occurred by major needle stick punctures or massive exposures with blood on dermatitis or exzema.
Fact
As of January 10, 1989, Dr. Mason, Acting Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, said that there have been 42 HCW’s infected in the U.S.A.
To date, less than one per cent of HCW’s who have suffered needle sticks while treating those infected with HIV have been reported as having seroconverted. More importantly and not mentioned in school lessons is the fact that the proportion of “inexplicable” AIDS cases among U.S. HCW’s has been holding at about nine per cent for almost two years.
Fact
“A hospital worker was exposed to blood while she was pressing gauze against the arm of a patient who was bleeding.” (New York Times, May 20, 1987) According to MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report), “She may have had a small amount of blood on her index finger before washing her hands…She had no open wounds, but her hands were chapped…and the duration of the contact with the blood of the patient…may have been as long as 20 minutes.”
Lesson
“Families of people who have AIDS have not spread the infection from the person with AIDS to the family members.”
Fact
The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta reported the case of a mother who contracted the disease by caring for her AIDS-infected baby (the baby had received a blood transfusion tested positive for the AIDS virus.)
Lesson
“On studies with children with AIDS and their siblings, these studies have not shown even one case of sibling-to-sibling transmission.
Fact
One brother received blood infected with AIDS and died three-and-a-half years later. When the child died, other family members were screened, and a brother, three years older than the boy who died, showed up positive. He had never had been given blood or blood products, and had not been sexually abused. (The Lancet, September 1986, “Dusseldorf siblings”)
All students must be fully informed of the true nature of the threat of the AIDS virus. The longer the truth is hidden from students, the greater will be the number of tragic deaths of innocent people.
Elaine Susoeff is a mother and school teacher in Chase, B.C. Further information on this lesson and scientific research quoted may be obtained by writing the author at P.O. Box 965, Chase, B.C., V0E 1M0.
