students about how to protect themselves against AIDS. What he finds terrifying is how many still don't believe AIDS can happen to them.

Bermuda is another world because here head teachers refuse condoms in the schools, reinforcing the students' beliefs that AIDS cannot happen to them. A recent report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association gave the young man more reason to despair.

US federal researchers found that AIDS and related infections have surpassed accidents, cancer and heart disease as the leading killer of 25-to 44-year-old men in five states and 64 cities. In many people AIDS takes 10 years to develop which means that many of the young men were infected in high school.

It may be that because high school head teachers do not see students with AIDS in school they do not believe that AIDS is infecting their young. "You'd think people would get it,'' said the young man who believes he was infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from unprotected sex during the early 1980s, when he was in high school.

What he encounters as he travels Connecticut is a sense of immortality among young people. He's not even sure that increased education would stem the tide.

"It's hard to get through to them because they don't think it's going to happen to them.'' He emphasises safe sex in his talks with high school students. Others say intravenous drug use is the bigger problem.

The findings by researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention paint a grim portrait of AIDS in America, the Journal said in an editorial. "Adolescent and young adult HIV transmission guarantees the continuation of the AIDS-HIV epidemic, barring a substantially expanded national prevention effort,'' wrote Dr. Sten Vermund of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

In the US, AIDS and related infections were the second-leading cause of death among young men, behind unintentional injuries; and sixth among young women, after cancer, unintentional injury, heart disease, suicide and homicide.

We think that Bermuda should learn from the experience of other countries.

There is no point in saying that students should be taught at home to abstain.

Figures covering everything from venereal disease to out of wedlock babies show that they do not abstain. The churches failed 1,000 years ago to prevent both fornication and adultery. The young do have sex and thus head teachers should protect them from AIDS and not expose them to death. There is not much point in teaching young people and leaving them vulnerable to death from AIDS.

There is less point in the reverse thinking of some head teachers who say parents do not do their job and then say AIDS and condoms should be dealt with by parents.

There is no point in some teachers trying to hide behind some vaguely possible legal ramifications of the supply of condoms.

Young people are dying from AIDS. It can happen to them. It does happen here.