Fear of AIDS threatens the country as much as the disease itself, but government education efforts can help the nation learn "positive lessons" from its tragedy, the head of Los Angeles' AIDS Discrimination Unit said last night.

"In times of upheaval, things are going to change," DeputyCity Attorney David L. Schulman told an audience of 35 at Andover Hall. "People who discriminate against AIDS victims respond very well to simple information about transmission, but there are deeper issues involved," he said. "AIDS is like a stain on a microscope slide; it highlights problems in society."

Schulman said that when he became the nation's first full-time government AIDS discrimination attorney in 1985, he had a small office and no legal precedents to follow--but hundreds of discrimination complaints. He said he realized his main task was to fight ignorance.

"The fear of AIDS has two parts, fear of the disease and fear of the epidemic," he said. "The illness itself and its effects on the immune system are simple to understand, but people have to be told four or five times before information sinks in."

He said that because of psychological barriers in United States culture, "People are not yet comfortable about conversations on sex, especially about the use of condoms and the practice of anal sex."

"There are stigmas attached to homosexuality and to mental illness, which often results [during] advanced stages of AIDS," Shulman said. "In this culture, which idealizes rugged individualism, and recently, narcissism, the helplessness of AIDS victims is taboo. And nobody likes to talk about death," he said.

Every society facing rampant disease has feared social disorder, he said. "Invariably this leads to the ostracism and isolation of victims and scapegoating of Jews, witches, or gays, which restores a false sense of social cohesion," he said.

Schulman called new constitutional interpretations as important as scientific advances that could cure the disease. "Civil rights for Blacks, women and the disabled provide a legal basis for the social resolution of the AIDS crisis," he said.

Despite this optimism, he said he worries about "misinformation" such as the recent Masters and Johnson report which suggested that contaminated people can transmit AIDS through casual social contact.

He also criticized medical technology which merely prolongs lives of AIDS victims into the painful stages of mental illness and raises medical costs. He warned that the pain may cause even higher suicide rates among AIDS victims, and that the high costs will increase pressure to legalize euthanasia. He said he favors home-based or hospice care as a more human alternative to institutionalized care.