[AIDS help--evaluation of a public health movement]

The "AIDS-Hilfe" movement-more than 80 local groups are presently united in the Federal German organization of the "Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe e. V." -looks back at a more than five years of experience in the fields of prevention for different target groups, counselling, care, PR-work and representation of interests. Central point of the concept of prevention of "AIDS-Hilfe" is the unprejudiced acceptance of people with HIV/AIDS and people at risk: homosexuals, i. v. drug users, prison inmates, haemophiliacs, and people who are not monogamous. A promising AIDS prevention is confronted by various difficulties: there are waves of hysteria, there is a lack of grants from Federal funds, there is moralizing instead of taking effective measures in health policy, there is a tendency to bureaucratize, there is a restrictive legal approach to the problems of AIDS, etc. In contrast to the good results prevention has already achieved in the group of homosexual men, is a farreaching ignorance and inhumanity on the part of political and administrative authorities in matters of drug use and imprisonment. The paradigm of abstinence is responsible for i. v. drug users to contract AIDS, because low-threshold measures, such as needle-exchange programmes and drug-substitution programmes, are refused. To remind the public this fact constantly and to fight for it will be a major concern of the "AIDS-Hilfe" movement. It must always be borne in mind that "principles" are secondary and that human beings must come first.