Subject: Tenfold Increase In Cases of AIDS Is Expected by 1991
Date: Published: 6/13/86 84 lines
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

   Tenfold Increase
   In Cases of AIDS
   Is Expected by 1991
    ---
   Public Health Service Group
   Projects 179,000 Deaths
   Within That Time Period
    ---
   By Marilyn Chase
   Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

   Senior scientists in the U. S. Public Health Service are
projecting a more than tenfold rise in AIDS cases by 1991.
   In a report, the scientists estimated that within five
years the number of Americans afflicted with acquired immune
deficiency syndrome would rise to 270,000, including 179,000
fatalities.  As of June 9, the disease had affected 21,517
Americans, of whom 11,713 are dead.
   The scientists said that 74,000 AIDS cases would develop
in the year 1991 alone.  That would be about three times the
incidence of new cases of polio in the peak year of 1952,
when about 22,000 cases were reported.
   The scientists met at Coolfont, W. Va., last week to work
on a five-year strategy for coping with AIDS. The virus-borne
disease destroys the body's ability to ward off disease, and
its victims frequently die of a variety of pneumonias,
cancers, bacterial infections or neurological complications.
   Although the numbers project a seemingly spectacular
increase, they are consistent with scientists' previous
expectations, based upon the Centers for Disease Control's
estimate that one million to 1.5 million Americans have been
exposed to the virus and that one-quarter of those will
develop the disease.
   Scientists who attended the meeting said the numbers in
the report represented "the lowest common denominator" upon
which the often-fractious federal health establishment could
agree.
   The projections don't include new cases of ARC, or AIDS
related complex, a group of sometimes fatal illnesses caused
by the virus but currently excluded from the technical
definition of AIDS. Currently, ARC patients outnumber AIDS
patients about 5-to-1, and many clinicians have charged that
the AIDS virus causes much more illness than is reflected in
the weekly count of the Centers for Disease Countrol.
   AIDS, which is spread by intimate sexual or blood contact,
is expected to stay distributed most heavily among
homosexuals.  But the report did forecast "some increase" in
the percentage of heterosexually transmitted AIDS cases,
which will be offset by somewhat fewer cases among
hemophiliacs and recipients of blood transfusions.  Currently,
73% of the cases are transmitted from homosexual contacts;
17% from intravenous drug use; 2% from heterosexual contacts
and 2% from transfusions.
   The disease also is expected to spread beyond its current
geographic boundaries that have kept it heavily concentrated
among the gay and drug-using populations of New York and San
Francisco.
   The report estimates costs of AIDS-related medical care in
1991 at between $8 billion and $16 billion.  Currently, the
average annual cost of care for each patient varies from
$70,000 to nearly $150,000.
   Currently more than a half dozen AIDS drugs are in human
clinical tests, including azidothymidine, ribaviran,
isoprinosine and HPA-23 and several centers are at work on
vaccine prototypes.  However, the report said that even if a
vaccine were developed before 1991 -- a timetable most
sources consider unlikely -- the projections would hold
because they are based upon people already infected with the
AIDS virus.
   The report added, "Antiviral drugs currently under
development are likely to repress rather than eliminate the
AIDS virus infection, (therefore) long-term therapy is
expected and with it, the emergence of drug-resistant
strains."

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