The PHS saw fit to offer only two sentences of guidance to gay men eager to avoid the strange new disease, despite reams of data collected in the still-unpublished case-control study. “Sexual contact should be avoided with persons known or suspected to have AIDS‚” the PHS wrote. “Members of high-risk groups should be aware that multiple sexual partners increase the probability of developing AIDS.” That statement represented the sum total of the U.S. government’s attempt to prevent the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome among gay men in March 1983, more than twenty months into the
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