The World - News from Oct. 5, 1987

Zambian President Kenneth D. Kaunda publicly acknowledged for the first time that his son’s death last year was caused by AIDS. “How my son got AIDS I do not know,” he told reporters at a news conference in Lusaka, the capital. His admission dramatized the severity of the problem of AIDS in his southern African nation. Western diplomats have estimated that about 20% of Zambia’s adult urban population is infected with the AIDS virus. Kaunda’s son, Masuzgo Gwebe Kaunda, 30, died of liver and kidney failure. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome is an affliction in which a virus attacks the body’s immune system. “It does not need my son’s death to appeal to the international community to treat the question of AIDS as a world problem,” Kaunda said.