From: bstring@mainz-emh2.army.mil (BOB STRINGFIELD)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: [ACHiggins:  A Threesome]
Date: 29 Jul 1992 08:28:10 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

Last paragraph of the threesome -- Aids $ comparison...
--bob

***************************
                           A Threesome

     Today's Times provides, in its NWR section, three brief
statements of interest to SCIFRAUD readers:  a report on an item
previously posted on SCIFRAUD concerning Treasury's efforts at
making its boss look good, a statement by William J. Broad (whose
book on Edward Teller was reviewed here some weeks ago) concerning
the ending of the testing of X-ray lasers, and a brief statement
concerning the AIDS Conference in Amsterdam.

     Here are the three of them.

                           ++++++++++

      \Nasar, Sylvia.  "The Rich Get Richer.  True or
     False?"  New York Times, 26 July 1992, p. 2E.\

          "Stung by the assertion that the super-rich did
     extraordinarily well in the 1980's. The Treasury
     Department struck back last week.  But its initiative
     flopped and the exercise turned out to be an
     embarrassment.
          "Treasury was taking aim at a calculation -- made
     by the M.I.T. economist Paul R. Krugman and embraced by
     Bill Clinton -- that shows that the richest 1 percent
     reaped 70 percent of the rise in average family income
     between 1977 and 1989.
          "To shoot down the report, Treasury fired off its
     own statistic showing that the top 1 percent got a mere
     11 percent of the total income gains between 1979 and
     1988.  The very rich, the Treasury said, 'fared
     somewhat better than average, but not very much
     better.'
          "But experts instantly spotted that the Treasury
     statistic was calculated in a way that all but
     guaranteed that the gains of the rich would appear
     modest.  To come up with its politically correct 11
     percent figure, Treasury had arbitrarily defined the
     top 1 percent as those with very high incomes in 1979.
     But, as Will Rogers would have appreciated, people at
     the top at the beginning of the period had nowhere to
     go, if they moved at all, but down.
          "A less biased approach would have been to
     calculate the gains of those who fell into the top 1
     percent based on their average income over the whole
     period.
          "This analysis the Treasury has declined to
     provide, but some enterprising academic will surely do
     it for them."

                      ++++++++++

      \Broad, William J.  "X-Ray Laser Zapped,"  New York
     Times,  26 July 1992, p. 2E.\

          "A gaping pit in the Nevada desert, 10 feet wide
     and 2,100 feet deep, has become a bleak memorial to a
     dream pursued by legions of Federal scientists at a
     cost of more than $1 billion.
          "The X-ray laser, powered by a nuclear blast, was
     a top-secret proposal that in the early 1980's first
     aroused White House interest in 'Star Wars' defenses.
     In theory, its powerful beams would zap enemy missiles.
     The program was zealously promoted by Edward Teller,
     architect of the H-bomb, but in 10 underground tests of
     the rudimentary idea in Nevada over as many years, the
     wonder weapon failed to materialize, embarrassing Mr.
     Teller and his Lawrence Livermore laboratory in
     California and generating much controversy in
     Washington.
          "Last week the effort came to a halt as the Bush
     Administration tightened its nuclear testing rules in
     an effect to dodge a Congressional ban on underground
     explosions.  At the Government's 1,350-square-mile test
     site in Nevada, engineers are preparing to disassemble
     gear from what was to have been the latest X-ray laser
     test.  Code named Greenwater, it had been scheduled for
     September.
          "The deep pit dug to contain the explosion will be
     capped and possibly used for some other nuclear test in
     the future."

                      ++++++++++

      \McNeil, Donald G., Jr.  "Once Again, the Disease
     Confounds Science,"  New York Times, 26 July 1992, p.
     2E.\

          "For a while it sounded like the start of the
     epidemic all over again:  a few doctors report treating
     patients with a mysterious disease that wastes the
     immune system, but for which they cannot find a cause.
     Federal health officials are disbelieving.  Then more
     doctors speak up, saying they have patients dying the
     same way.  A public health crisis develops -- fear for
     the blood supply, doubts about tests that reassured the
     worried.
          "But this time, it all took a week, not years, and
     it all happened inside the walls of a conference in
     Amsterdam that was already studying the disease that
     rose out of nowhere in the 1980's and now will almost
     certainly kill tens of millions:  AIDS.
          "The new mystery is that doctors from cities as
     desperate as Los Angeles, New York, Edinburgh and the
     Hague reported cases -- they seemed to total about 30 -
     - of people who were dying of AIDS-like symptoms but
     tested negative for the two known H.I.V. viruses.
          "The question became:  Is a new virus out there?
     Or is there another cause?  Whatever it is, are blood
     transfusions safe?  Does a negative AIDS test still
     mean anything?
          "By week's end, the Federal Centers for Disease
     Control had dropped their initial skeptical tone and
     said tracking down the answers would be 'an extremely
     important priority.'
          A California doctor said he had found a new virus
     in a 66-year-old woman with AIDS-like symptoms and in
     her healthy 38-year-old daughter.  The mother was in no
     known risk group but had a blood transfusion in the
     early 1950's, before her daughter was born.  Other
     virologists said it would take months to test his
     discovery, since stray and harmless viruses contaminate
     virtually every lab tissue experiment.
          "And while the conference vibrated as each new
     doctor came up to toss his patients' records on the
     table, other reports, just as discouraging if not as
     startling, were released:  The disease, which first
     struck largely at men, is now spreading much more
     rapidly through heterosexual transmission, particularly
     in Africa and Southeast Asia.  It is following roads
     and navigable rivers into rural areas, and soon will
     reach the point where it begins claiming more women
     each year -- which also means that many more children
     will be born with the disease, or will be left orphans
     by it.
          "The price of caring for AIDS patients is
     skyrocketing because of the cost of new drugs that seem
     to keep patients healthier but may not make them live
     longer.  The lifetime cost of treating an AIDS patient
     in the United States is now $102,000 up from $57,000 as
     recently as 1988.
          And the disparity between rich and poor seemed
     even more evidence in AIDS treatment as it is in other
     things.  The annual amount spent per patient, the
     conference was told, is $38,000 in the United States,
     $22,300 in Western Europe, $2,000 in Latin America --
     and $393 in Africa."

                           ++++++++++

     Would anyone care to spell out some of the implications of
these three items?  Certainly there is much to be said about each
one.

        ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
        +                     A. C. Higgins                    +
        +         SS 361  SUNYA  Albany, New York 12222        +
        +   E-mail:  ACH13@ALBNYVMS;  ACH13@USCSC1.Albany.edu  +
        +    Phone: (518) 442 - 4678; FAX: (518) 442 - 4936    +
        +                   SCIFRAUD@ALBNYVM1                  +
        ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
**************************