University Daily Kansan / Thursday, August 30, 1990
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State AIDS plan to focus on prevention, education
Bv David Roach
TOPEKA — The Kansas Department of Health and Environment yesterday unveiled a seven part plan to combat AIDS.
Kansan staff writer
Charles Konigsberg, KDHE director, said Kansas had a good opportunity to deal with AIDS on a preventative basis because the state was not inundated with clinical cases of the disease.
Stanley C. Grant, KDHE secretary, said the plan, called Kansas Responds to AIDS, emphasized information and education as the most effective methods of halting the spread of AIDS.
"We can track the disease, conduct the tests and count the numbers, but if we don't succeed in changing the behaviors that result in HIV and AIDS, all of our efforts will be for naught," he said.
He said that almost 400 AIDS cases
had been diagnosed in Kansas, and that 2,700 to 3,500 people probably had been infected by the HIV virus.
Konigsberg said the plan addressed all areas of AIDS prevention and treatment but did not assume that KDHE would carry out all the activities necessary to combat AIDS.
"This is a working plan," he said. "We're already using it and many of the elements have been carried out." Kongsberg said the plan provided
"It stresses involvement of a wide array of professional and community-based groups working collaboratively in the war on this disease," he wrote.
Recording and monitoring AIDS cases.
- Education aimed at high-risk groups, health professionals and the general public.
Counseling and testing.
- Increasing the availability of health care to people with AIDS.
- Coordination of community organ-
health care to people with AIDS.
■ Coordination of community organizations.
Planning and evaluation of specific programs
Special projects that will respond to new developments in the fight against AIDS.
Kongsberg said that Kansas had spent more than $1 million from state and federal sources combatting AIDS since 1985.
He said providing health care for people with AIDS was the biggest challenge KDHE faced.
"As a public health official, I think our biggest responsibility is prevention." Kongsberg said. "But I think we have to be very careful and be heavily impacted on the care end."
"Our problems are miniscule compared to New York state or Florida, but we're also way behind in coming up with an approach to health care."
Chemist relates zinc to AIDS
"This research has important implications for the development of
The Associated Press
CATONSVILLE, Md. — A chemist says he has determined that zinc plays a key role in the spread of the AIDS virus, which could lead to a vaccine or drugs to combat the disease.
Michael Summers, professor of chemistry at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, said Tuesday he had found that zine was the glue that bound one protein critical to the virus' duplication to the genetic material that made the virus infectious.
Zine is present in the body. If researchers can develop a drug that alters, eliminates or masks the zinc, the infectious material won't exist when new virus cells are formed, Summers said.
an AIDS vaccine," Summers said.
He said healthy people could be injected with a non-infectious virus to make them develop an immunity to the infectious form,
He emphasized that a vaccine was still a long way off but said the research provided another avenue to develop drugs developing development drugs against AIDS.
Summers' findings were published Tuesday in Biochemistry, a weekly journal of the American Chemical Society.
He said the results were similar to those that led to the development of the AIDS-fighting drug AZT. AIDS researchers have found that rendering it helps in fight disease.
A biochemist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine said that the findings were an important, albeit small, step.
"In addition to potentially being an approach for development of vaccines, this research has provided the basis for drug development," Kofs said.
"It really does present a new avenue of research which had been at least underappreciated if not completely unrecognized," said Jeremy Kirkman, who suggested zinc as a molecular glue in certain viruses four years ago.
Wayne Koff, an AIDS vaccine researcher at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Md., called the findings interesting.
Summers said scientists at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick had begun work on a drug based on his research but cautioned that there was no known way to alter the zinc.
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