Parents keep children home over A.I.D.S.

Press, 11 September 1985, Page 10

Parents keep children home over A.I.D.S.

NZPA-AP New york More than 250,000 children in two New York districts did not show up for the first day of school yesterday as parents protested against the city’s decision to let an elementary school pupil with A.I.D.S attend public classes. The identity of the child and the child’s school was not disclosed. Some demonstrating parents said that their children would stay home until they found out just which school the child with the incurable disease

was attending. A.1.D.5., or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, is an often fatal affliction in which the body’s immune system becomes unable to resist disease. It is most likely to strike homosexuals, abusers of injectable drugs, and haemophiliacs, and can apparently be spread by sexual contact, contaminated needles and blood transfusions, but not by casual contact. Some children have been born with the' disease because their mothers carried

the virus. The Mayor, Mr Edward Koch, after visiting a school in one of the districts, said that none of the children he had seen were talking about A.I.D.S. and that parents were only scaring them by publicising the issue. “I’m suggesting to the parents, don’t upset your child,” he said outside Public School 26 in Fresh Meadows. “You can only add to the tension of going to school. Don’t add to the problems of a child by talking about it.”