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Perhaps we can permanently quarantine all those who have AIDS or are discovered to have it and we can resolve your disagreement. It is the leprosy of our time and is quite cummonicable and ought to be dealt with as the public health problem that it is.

A close friend of mine who was a hemophiliac died of AIDS back in the 80's at the age of 14. He did not deserve to be outcast. The spread of AIDs is a symptom of the crime, not the crime itself.

No one suggested quaranteening. But you do know that the gay lobby has made it impossible to ask a blood donor if he is gay,,am I correct on that still? That amazes me too. Political correctness to death. I think that is the thing about the entire aids epidemic that is so disheartening,,PC behavior reigned from the beginniing when no one in San Francisco would act to close the bathhouses where the epidemic was raging until it got out of control.

My uncle contracted tuberculosis in World War II while in the Army. He was quarantined at (I believe) Fort Devens, Massachusetts, for a year or two after the war until he was without symptoms and certainly not going to transmit TB to others. He never complained even once and is still alive at 85. I asked him, when I was a kid, why he wasn't outraged. He answered that quarantining him was common sense.

I am not beating up on you, much less for your understandable sympathy for a friend, innocent of misbehavior. I have acquaintances who are hemophiliac but not HIV positive. Hemophiliacs also need protection from the libertinian lavenders (who might donate blood) who don't really care who dies so long as they get their kicks.

Quarantine is not punishment. It is medical and public health prudence. We can separate hemophiliacs from others but let us not allow the exceptions to swallow the rule. Bill Buckley once advocated tattoos in the intimate areas of the HIV positive as a clear warning to the uninfected lavenders or others.