Ashe’s Sad, Stunning AIDS Announcement

HE DIDN’T INDULGE IN HIGH-RISK OR HIGH-VOLUME sex. He didn’t shoot drugs. Tennis superstar Arthur Ashe simply lay down on an operating table in 1983 to undergo heart-bypass surgery, and when he got up he had contracted HIV — the AIDS virus.

Ashe, 48, found out about the infection in 1988. Until last week he kept quiet, figuring that, unlike basketball superstar Magic Johnson, he was no longer a public figure. But USA Today approached him to confirm what had until then been a rumor, and Ashe reluctantly spoke up.

It was just bad luck that Ashe underwent major surgery after the AIDS epidemic began but before tests to detect the virus in the blood supply became available in 1985. Since then, only 20 of the nation’s more than 200,000 aids cases have come from transfusions of tested blood, while nearly 4,500 have been attributed to untested blood. Nowadays, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the chances of contracting the disease from a transfusion are 1 in 61,000. More people are killed by lightning. (See related story on page 74.)