CDC reports also indicate a drop in sexual activities among teens and increased use of comdoms. This is the good news. How one interprets what follows depends upon one's awareness of politics and finances in the AIDS struggle.

It is apparent, say CDC interpreters, that AIDS has fallen to Second Place as the killer of young adults 25-44, probably, a CDC spokesperson reflects, as the result of so many who now live longer because they consume drugs that assure enormous/alarming effects on the body.

The word is this: there's been a 26% overall drop in AIDS deaths between 1995-1996. Headlines say, "AIDS has lost Its Place as the Number 1 Killer."

Killer Number One? Accidents and/or auto crashes. Cancer ranks Three.

The making of such public announcements-- the rankings of death causations-- deeply concerns many who are involved in the struggle against AIDS and who believe that any such downsizing of AIDS leads to a general complacency. Others fear that if the government can--using statistics-- easily decrease public alarm over AIDS, so too can it reduce public concern over emergency life and death funding for people currently affected.

Worse, it can bury significant life and death issues by ignoring them even more than it does now.

These are central dilemmas with which AIDS activists, no matter their locale, must contend daily. Volunteerism depends on the public's awareness of need. If that awareness is reduced due to certain narrowly focused statistical data, a data that looks less at infection rates and more at death rates, a kind of blindness-causing voodoo on the public will have been performed.

This announcement bears all the trappings of a political party's boast in store. In the middle of a great war being fought, some make take it as a burst of light on the horizon, offering hope to those now toiling nigh-thanklessly in real-life AIDS trenches. It is these people who know best that "AIDS is World War III."

"We can't sit down and say, 'Oh boy, we're winning'," says one ACT UP sympathizer, "This is a war against a terrible disease and against all of those forces that make it even worse. We can't take time to breathe relief. We can hardly blink."

The drop in deaths follows earlier reports that offer similar government-announced encouragements. Last year, AIDS deaths declined for the first time since 1981 when the epidemic surfaced.

Dr. John Ward, the CDC's chief of AIDS surveillance says he's reassured but cautions, ``You like to have multiple studies saying the same thing before you begin to consider what you're seeing is indeed the truth.''

1996 AIDS death rates fell, says the CDC, to 11.6 deaths per 100,000 people, dropping 26 percent from a rate of 15.6 the previous year. For adults between 25 and 44, the rate fell to 27.2 deaths from a rate of 36.9 in 1995.

It was in 1994 that AIDS first rose in the ranks to top killer status.