Date: 09 Dec 93 21:33:46 EST
Subject: Church Reconsiders Pro-Gay Report
From: anon@queernet.org (Anonymous Sender)

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By The Associated Press
   The nation's largest Lutheran group has vowed to keep closer tabs on
a task force that provoked widespread protests for supporting
homosexual unions, but the church is not backing off from the sex wars.
   The Church Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
voted to appoint an 11-member consulting panel to work with the task
force to make sure any official policy on human sexuality would stand
on biblical foundations and the confessional tradition of the church.
   Church officials also announced Thursday that the council has
decided to hire up to three people to replace the Rev. Karen L.
Bloomquist, who was removed as the director of the sexuality study
after the first draft was released.
   "We do have a crisis," said church head Bishop Herbert Chilstrom. "A
crisis can be a doorway to looking at things in a new way or a teaching
moment."
   The church is in the middle of its first attempt to grapple with
sexuality since it was formed in 1988 by the merger of the Lutheran
Church in America, the American Lutheran Church and the Association of
Evangelical Lutheran Churches.
   A 21-page report released in October, "The Church and Human
Sexuality: A Lutheran Perspective," urged members to challenge
traditional biblical condemnations of homosexuality, and argued that
supporting and even moving toward a practice of blessing committed
same-sex unions are practices "strongly supported by responsible
biblical interpretation."
   "It is the binding commitment, not the license or ceremony, that
lies at the heart of biblical understandings of marriage," the draft
statement said.
   Even before the statement was released, the 67-member Conference of
Bishops expressed concerns about how marriage appeared to be equated
with the term "loving, committed relationship," and in particular with
the way Scripture was interpreted in defense of homosexual
relationships.
   The reaction from the pews was immediate, and largely negative.
   Chilstrom said he received about 700 letters.
   "Most of the negative letters go directly to the issue of
homosexuality. It is very clear that that is the flash point," he said
in a statement.
   The Church Council, the 5.2 million-member denomination's
legislative body between its biennial churchwide assemblies, voted 25-7
last week against stopping work on a sexuality statement.
   However, in its official statement released Thursday, the council
acknowledged "strong signs that trust in the current task force has
been impaired" and that significant modifications were required for the
process to be widely accepted and trusted.
   While it did not set specific boundaries, the council also said no
statement would be recommended to a Churchwide Assembly unless it would
stand on biblical foundations and merit widespread support within the
church.

9-DEC-1993 14:17 HIV ANTIBODY RESPONSE MAY HELP DEVELOP
VACCINE
    By Caroline Brothers
    LONDON, (Reuter) - U.S. researchers said they had identified
a previously unknown antibody response to HIV, the virus that
leads to AIDS, which may be an important step toward developing
a vaccine.
    Writing in the Lancet medical journal to be published Friday,
the researchers said they had found a small number of patients
who had HIV antibodies in their urine but not their blood. They
believe those patients have developed a rare type of immunity to
HIV infection.
    "We've never seen a reaction like this before," biomedical
researcher Dr Howard Urnovitz told Reuters. "It lends us new
hopes for a HIV vaccine strategy."
    Urnovitz, founder of the U.S.-based Calypte biomedical
research company, worked with Dr Mario Clerici and Dr Gene Sherer
of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, testing 1,804 people for
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) antibodies. They found seven
who tested positive only in the urine test.
    "Our first major conclusion was that you can have antibodies
in urine and not in blood -- one of the first examples of
compartmentalism of immune response," he said.
    Compartmentalism is thought to occur when the body evolves a
localised response to infections specific to each tissue site.
    "Because they showed this unique immunity the suggestion was
made that perhaps they have a systemic immunity to the
virus...which happens independently of antibody immunity,"
Urnovitz said.
    The body's usual immune response to most viruses is known as
cell-mediated immunity in which killer cells attack infected
cells, and five of the seven people were found to have evidence
of this type of response to HIV in their urine.
    Most studies of HIV and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome
(AIDS) have typically involved blood tests in which a different
type of response to HIV infection -- the development of
antibodies -- is observed.
    Urnovitz said the discovery of cell-mediated immunity to HIV
in urine suggested that development of a vaccine should focus on
cell-mediated immunity rather than on developing an antibody.
    Asked whether scientists were any closer to developing a
vaccine, he said:
    "It looks better because Clerici and Sherer have noticed that
people with cell-mediated immunity do not convert to AIDS," he
said. "This probably saved (those patients) from HIV
progression."
    He said the data highlighted the need to study HIV infection
in populations other than those identified as positive through
blood tests, and raised hopes that the disease could one day be
reversible.
    "Until 1993 we were led to believe that HIV was 100 percent
fatal -- I think we need to review that statement," he said.

9-DEC-1993 15:14 Urine test reveals HIV immune response
   WASHINGTON (UPI) -- A small number of people exposed to the
AIDS- causing human immunodeficiency virus may be able to fight
off the infection because of an unusual "compartmentalized"
immune response, researchers reported Thursday.
   The report, in the medical journal The Lancet, may help
scientists trying to develop strategies against the deadly virus.
   Researchers studied seven people whose urine tests indicated
antibodies to HIV but whose blood tests were either indeterminate
or negative for HIV antibodies.
   While one of the patients apparently had not been exposed to
HIV, further study indicated the remaining six had been exposed,
even though they had not developed HIV infection.
   "These cases may be demonstrating a unique type of immunity to
(HIV) in that they have not seroconverted and may not progress to
AIDS," said Dr. Howard Urnovitz and colleagues in their report.
   "We now believe that some individuals may be able to contain
or eliminate the virus from their bodies altogether," Urnovitz,
the study's lead author and a scientist at Calypte Biomedical of
Berkeley, Calif., which developed the urine test for HIV
antibodies, said in a statement.
   Urnovitz said the findings suggest that the human immune
system may be compartmentalized -- that other factors, perhaps
other infections, may misdirect the body's immune system defenses
trying to fight HIV.
   Further study comparing urine test results to blood test
results could help researchers developing vaccines and treatments
against AIDS, the researchers said.

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