Kimberly Bergalis Was A Symbol Of Aids Debate

MIAMI - Kimberly Bergalis, the first person in the United States believed to have contracted AIDS from a health-care professional, died in her sleep of the disease early yesterday at her home in Fort Pierce, Fla. She was 23.

"She went to sleep peacefully, and she died peacefully," her father, George Bergalis, said yesterday.

In the last week, her condition steadily worsened, and her pain increased. On Friday, she stopped eating. On Saturday, breathing became more and more difficult. Before her parents put her in bed Saturday night, they spoke with her for what they all knew would probably be the last time, George Bergalis said.

"Her mother said, `Kim, I want you to have a restful sleep, and I want you to consider whether you want to wake up and face all this suffering.' I told her God is watching over you, and we love you," her father said. "Then she went to sleep. She knew. I think she was just waiting until she felt we were prepared for it."

A NATIONAL SYMBOL

Bergalis, apparently infected by her dentist during a routine procedure, became a national symbol of the insidious nature of the epidemic after she left her death bed in September and traveled to Washington to poignantly lobby Congress in favor of a bill that would make AIDS testing mandatory for health-care workers who perform invasive surgical procedures.

Seated in a wheelchair, her body hauntingly thin, she peered over a battery of photographers and, in a voice barely above a whisper, said: "I did not do anything wrong, yet I am being made to suffer like this."

BILL DIES

As moving as her 15-second-long testimony was, however, the so-called Bergalis bill died in committee and Bergalis herself touched off a controversy when many AIDS activists saw her as the focal point of a conservative backlash directed at gays.

Robert Montgomery, an attorney for the Bergalis family, said yesterday that those criticisms were misdirected.

"There are many lessons to be learned from Kimberly," Montgomery said. "The courage and determination the child had was incredible. Her message was that this is not just a homosexual disease. It is everyone's disease."

Since the AIDS epidemic began 10 years ago, the disease has claimed more than 113,000 lives in the United States. Medical authorities say that doctor-patient transmissions are extremely unlikely, although at least 40 of approximately 6,400 infected health-care workers have contracted the virus from patients' blood.

THE FIRST

But Bergalis was the first patient in the United States believed to have contracted AIDS from a doctor without engaging in any of the known high-risk activities. She said that she never had used drugs, never had a blood transfusion and never had engaged in sex.

In a scenario later confirmed by Centers for Disease Control investigators, Bergalis' dentist, Dr. David Acer, somehow infected her while removing two molars in December 1987. "If it happened to me, it could happen to anyone," she once said.

Bergalis weighed no more than 70 pounds at the end and complained of a pasty substance that coated her mouth and tongue like rust. Early last summer, her father, George, said that she stopped praying for miracles and prayed instead to die.

But in the fall she staged a brief rally, and during that time traveled to Washington to urge passage of the bill sponsored by Rep. William Dannemeyer, R-Calif. After returning home to Fort Pierce, 100 miles north of Miami, her decline was "agonizing and steady," said Montgomery, the family attorney.

Over the last few months, Bergalis, her father and her mother, Anna, gave dozens of interviews, urging in each that mandatory testing of doctors, nurses and others involved in many invasive procedures could prevent AIDS from being transmitted.

"Do I blame myself?" Bergalis wrote last April in a note intended for a state health investigator. "I sure don't. . . . I blame Dr. Acer and every single one of you bastards. Anyone who knew Dr. Acer was infected and had full-blown AIDS and stood by not doing a damn thing about it. You are all just as guilty as he was.

"If laws are not formed to provide protection, then my suffering and death was in vain.

"I'm dying, guys. Goodbye."

After a visit to Bergalis' bedside in July, Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles said that his moments with her were "almost like being in the presence of a saint."

Acer, 40, of Stuart, Fla., died of AIDS in September 1990 after selling his practice and advising his 1,700 former patients to be tested. Since Bergalis was identified, four other former patients of Acer have also tested positive for the same strain of the AIDS virus.

Despite an exhaustive investigation, CDC officials have been unable to establish exactly how Acer infected his patients. At first it was thought that Acer, a bisexual who found out that he had AIDS in 1987, had cut himself and bled directly into his patients' mouths. Now, according to CDC investigators, evidence suggests that the dentist failed to disinfect his instruments.