The New York Times
Copyright 1997: The New York Times

March 1, 1997, page  22

I applaud the Feb. 22 editorial advocating Federal funds for clean needles.  It is important to fill in the part of the story that has to do with race and ethnicity.  More than 70 percent of all injection-related AIDS cases have occurred among African- and Hispanic-Americans.  Drug-related AIDS is not a trivial part of the AIDS epidemic.  By the end of June 1996, 193,000 thousand Americans were living with injection-related AIDS or had already died from it.

Dawn Day
Princeton, N.J.,  Feb. 24, 1997
The writer is director of the Dogwood Center, a social policy group.