Subject: AIDS Gender Gap Is Seen Closing Fast
Date: Published: 7/21/92 (77 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Technology & Health:
    AIDS Gender Gap Is Seen Closing Fast
    ---
    Women Are Most Vulnerable
    To HIV for Social Reasons
    Linked to Partner Status
    ----
    By Marilyn Chase
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    AMSTERDAM -- The World Health Organization said the AIDS gender
 gap is closing fast, placing women at increasing risk of contracting
 the disease.
    "Half of the one million people infected since the beginning of
 this year are women," said Michael Merson, head of WHO's Global
 Program on AIDS.  "By the year 2000, more than half of newly infected
 adults will be women."
    In remarks at the International Conference on AIDS, Dr. Merson
 said old distinctions between risk groups and the rest of the
 population are dissolving.  "Lines are becoming blurred," said Dr. 
 Merson.  For a host of biological and social reasons, "The most
 vulnerable people continue to be women and young girls."
    In the U. S., AIDS hasn't reached gender parity.  However, women
 now constitute the single fastest-growing patient group in the
 country -- the growth fueled largely by intravenous drug use, or sex
 with drug users.
    Once rare in AIDS wards, women now make up one in every six new
 AIDS cases in the U. S. That proportion is sure to increase in the
 future because up to one in every four newly infected American is
 female, said James Curran of the U. S. Centers for Disease Control.
    The increasing vulnerability of women parallels a rise in the
 importance of the spread of the disease among heterosexuals.
 World-wide, over 70% of infections are estimated to occur through
 heterosexual relations, according to Anke Erhardt of the Columbia
 School of Medicine.
    Unlike the gay community, where behavior change has slowed
 sharply the spread of AIDS, efforts to prevent heterosexual
 transmission may be stymied by the social and cultural status of
 women around the world, she said.
    While prevention programs have stressed monogamy and condom use,
 Dr. Erhardt said women in many cultures can't control their
 partner's behavior in or outside the home.  In an example of this,
 Dr. Merson said one in four African women attending a baby clinic in
 Kigali, Rwanda, said they became infected with AIDS by their
 husbands, who had been their only sexual partners.
    "It's an enormous problem," Dr. Erhardt said.  "We can't just pass
 out condoms.  I hear it everywhere, from Africa to Asia:  Women don't
 have the power to demand condoms."
    She urged swift development of the "female condom," a device now
 being considered by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration.
    In other developments at the AIDS Conference, two researchers
 struggled to quell alarms touched off by recent reports that a dozen
 patients with AIDS symptoms test negative for both known strains of
 the AIDS virus, HIV1 and HIV2.
    Gerald Myers of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico
 noted AIDS viruses mutate with extraordinary speed, and so far HIV1
 alone has spawned five different strain groups.
    Asked if this could be the first sign of a third AIDS virus,
 Gerald Myers said:  "If an HIV3 were to appear, it would ...fail
 to respond to standard tests" just as these cases have done.
    However he stressed, he has looked at blood samples from those
 patients and so far found there's is "no molecular evidence that
 it's a virus."
    Added CDC's Dr. Curran:  "These are occasional cases, with no
 clear pattern, possibly from different causes.  Twelve to 15 cases --
 at a time when there are 100,000 AIDS patients -- is vastly less of
 a public health problem" than illness caused by HIV1 and HIV2.
    "It's important to get to the bottom of it," Dr. Curran added.
 "But it doesn't represent a new epidemic."

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