Office of Public Information and Communications Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 (212) 854-5573
Fifteen years into the epidemic, much is known about AIDS but neither a vaccine nor a cure has been found. Education is still the best prevention, say the authors of an updated edition of The Essential AIDS Fact Book, just published.
"Our approach in this book is pro-sex and pro-gay," said Laura Pinsky, a therapist at the Columbia University Health Service and co-author of the 120-page volume. "What we try to do in the book, as well as in our counseling and education efforts, is to separate issues of information from issues of morality and give people the information they need to make their own decisions."
First published in 1987 by Pocket Books, the book was revised and reissued in its fourth edition in April. More than 100,000 copies have been distributed for sale in bookstores, as textbooks in college AIDS courses and as part of college and university AIDS education programs. Ms. Pinsky dedicated the new edition to her co-author, Paul Harding Douglas, who died of AIDS in July 1995. The book was prepared in cooperation with the Columbia University Health Service and proceeds are used for the University's health education and AIDS counseling.
The new edition updates demographic information about the spread of the disease into heterosexual communities and points out that women and children are also at risk. There is continued emphasis on health care strategies for HIV-positive people, with new information about treating AIDS and a more comprehensive resource guide.
By now, Ms. Pinsky said in an interview, most sexually active adults know that AIDS is not spread casually, that it is not limited to homosexuals and intravenous drug users and that sexual intercourse without a condom is risky. There are nevertheless complicated social and psychological issues related to risk reduction that individuals need to address, she said. For example, some people become so afraid of HIV infection that they alternate complete abstention with impulsive episodes of high-risk sex, the authors say. Others deny that the epidemic has any chance of affecting them and continue high-risk behaviors. Information can help, said Richard G. Carlson, M.D., director of the Health Service, who writes in the book's introduction that some 8 million people will have died of AIDS by the year 2000. "The book can give readers some control in their life and relationships over one of the most serious public health problems they and the world have ever had to face," Dr. Carlson said.
In 1985, Ms. Pinsky started to hear questions about AIDS from the Columbia University students she counseled. What caused it? How was it transmitted? What did you do if you "got" it?
She recruited Mr. Douglas, then a Ph.D. student at Columbia, and together they founded the Columbia Gay Health Advocacy Project, a unit of the Health Service and the first AIDS awareness effort on an American college or university campus. With other University health educators, they visited dormitories and set up tables with the safe sex message. Within a couple of years, the education effort had expanded to include HIV antibody testing at the Health Service, including counseling before and after the test, again a Columbia first.
Ms. Pinsky and Mr. Douglas wrote a report detailing how the disease is spread for a University AIDS Committee. "Pocket Books happened to get a copy of that report and approached us about doing it commercially," she said. Today The Essential AIDS Fact Book is available at bookstores for $7.
The work has proved its worth. Arthur Ashe wrote that it helped him understand his pneumonia infection. Vogue praised its direct approach: "The world of the college health clinic has no room for niceties." And Mathilde Krim, co-founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research and associate research scientist at St. Luke's/Roosevelt Hospital Center and Columbia's College of Physicians & Surgeons, commends the authors in her preface "for their grasp of the complex, dynamic processes at play in the unfolding epidemic and their ability to write about them in a lucid and concise way."
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