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Thursday, February 11, 1988 / University Daily Kansan
Dan Starling/KANSAN
Brian Gower, St. Louis junior, peers through a differential leveler during lab for Civil Engineering 240. The class practiced surveying the valley surrounding Potter Lake on Monday to calculate the differences in vertical elevation.
Peek-a-boo
Networks won't carry condom ads
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Condom makers have been unable to get television networks to sell them advertising time despite the spread of AIDS, but they have found business can be very good without the cost of a nationwide TV campaign.
Retail condom sales rose by nearly a third to about $200 million in 1987, industry officials estimate. Sales had been rising at a single-digit rate in each of the previous five years.
The major television networks have not changed their position, but other media outlets that once refused contraceptive ads are now accepting condom ads if they stress the condom's role in preventing the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome and other sexually transmitted diseases
But sales still are increasing at a higher rate than before
"We changed our position because the climate had changed," said Lou Slovinsky, a spokesman for Time Inc., which publishes Time, People and Sports Illustrated. "It was more acceptable to talk about condoms given the clear and present danger that venereal diseases are presenting today."
Condom makers have developed advertising that focuses on disease prevention, but some magazines and local broadcast stations who accept the ads said demand for them was low. Industry insiders said the 1987
increase occurred even though only about $5 million was spent on advertising.
The manufacturers said a major reason for the sales gain from the RPM is that they are better at controlling
Public health experts, including Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, repeatedly have cited condoms as one way to prevent the spread of the deadly virus, which can be transmitted during sexual intercourse and is blamed for more than 29,200 deaths in the United States.
tion, the condom makers gained new sales outlets, such as grocery stores, and more prominent store displays. They have also designed more attractive packaging.
As condoms became a more frequent topic of everyday conversas
Koop first drew attention to condoms in the fall of 1986 when he said the devices offer "the best protection against infection right now, barring abstinence."
Eugene Freed at Ansell-Americas estimated the 1987 retail market for condoms at about $200 million, up about a third, and other industry observers and officials generally agreed.
The networks said that a significant portion of their audiences may object to the ads on religious or moral grounds and that the issue is covered extensively in news shows and in public service ads.
Researcher will give controversial AIDS views
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A researcher who says federal experts are wrong about the cause of AIDS but are embarrassed to admit error, will receive the first public airing of his street face before a presidential commission.
Feb. 20 in New York.
Dr. Peter Duesberg, a respected virus researcher at the University of California-Berkeley, will appear before the Presidential Commission on the HIV Epidemic at a hearing on
It will be the first time, he said, for the federal government to acknowledge his suggestion that acquired immune deficiency syndrome may be caused by immunodeficiency than the human immunodeficiency virus.
Duesberg said he angered colleagues at the National Institutes of Health when he questioned their conclusions about HIV in an article last March in the journal Cancer Research. He said other researchers
have declined to publically debate the issue with him.
"IHV has become a billion-dollar virus and nobody wants to admit that it might not be the one causing AIDS," Duesberg said.
really incontrovertible now," Fischinger said. "Many of the reputable scientists in this field just don't want to go into a public forum and debate the issues because they don't think there is anything to debate about."
But Dr. Peter J. Fischinger, the Health and Human Services coordinator of the federal war on AIDS, said the preponderance of the evidence has convicted HIV as the AIDS villain.
Duesberg said other researchers shun him because so much now is at stake that nobody wants to question the HIV-AIDS connection. All of the government testing and research, he said, is centered on HIV "and no alternative views are tolerated."
The sum of the information is
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