Subject: AIDS Meeting Is Dominated by Reports Of Disease in HIV-Negative Patients 
Date: Published: 7/24/92 (99 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Technology & Health:
    AIDS Meeting Is Dominated by Reports
    Of Disease in HIV-Negative Patients
    ----
    By Marilyn Chase
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    AMSTERDAM -- The international AIDS conference -- a medical
 marathon stretching over five days and 5,000 medical studies -- will
 stagger to a close today after being overtaken by two reports that
 weren't even on its agenda.
    Conferees came to this city thinking that they knew the enemy:  It
 was the human immunodeficiency virus that was at the root of the
 fatal sex-and-blood-borne epidemic.  Or was it?  Suddenly, two slender
 reports by U. S. researchers suggested that patients can get an
 AIDS-like disease without the virus and may harbor fragments of a
 new microbe.
    Experts were caught flat-footed.  James Curran, the AIDS chief at
 the U. S. Centers for Disease Control, was initially testy:  "I didn't
 think it was worth alerting the nation," he responded.  Then, stunned
 by the outcry that followed, he said he would investigate
 vigorously, though he urged reporters to put the reports "in the
 perspective of one million U. S. patients with HIV.  "
    Anthony Fauci, the top AIDS doctor at the National Institutes of
 Health, said that he saw "no reason to panic" and that "the
 scientific community is investigating this."  Yesterday, the World
 Health Organization said it plans to call an urgent meeting to
 assess the evidence.
    To AIDS activists who had come here to take the pulse of the
 larger epidemic, millions of acquired immune deficiency syndrome
 patients seemed suddenly eclipsed by a few dozen cases of an
 apparently similar but mysterious new illness.  After AIDS expert
 David Ho of New York was awakened and summoned back to the press
 room to comment on one of the reports, activist Martin Delaney
 complained:  "We're being jerked around by premature publicity.  We've
 got `science by press conference' in the middle of the night, and
 the public mind is held hostage."
    The stage was set over the weekend as more than 10,000 conferees
 and reporters piled into Amsterdam.  Newsweek reported that Jeffrey
 Laurence, a Cornell University immunologist, had discovered five
 patients in his practice with severe immunodeficiency but without a
 trace of HIV.  
    At a hastily convened session, other scientists appeared to lend
 credence to his report by stating that they too had seen patients
 with AIDS-like symptoms but without HIV in their blood.  In all, two
 to three dozen such anecdotes surfaced, though it's still unclear
 whether they result from the same cause or are merely a jumble of
 scientific apples and oranges.  Much was made of two cases cited by
 Luc Montagnier, a discoverer of the AIDS virus, but both of those
 patients tested positive for HIV in urine tests.
    On Wednesday Sudhir Gupta, a cancer specialist at the University
 of California at Irvine, reported that a 66-year-old woman with
 AIDS-like symptoms has fragments of what seems to be a new virus.
    In an interview yesterday, Dr. Gupta responded to questions about
 his research raised by scientists at the AIDS conference.  Skeptics
 say the particles described by Dr. Gupta have been known for years
 and that there's no evidence they cause disease.
    Dr. Gupta acknowledged that such particles aren't entirely new.
 But he said he is convinced that the viral particles he is studying
 are viruses:  "If we take the fluid part from the infected cells, and
 then put it together with noninfected cells, we can transfer the
 infection to noninfected cells.  We wouldn't be able to do that if it
 weren't a virus."
    Yesterday, as experts continued to examine data, Dr. Gerald
 Myers, who compiles data on HIV's genetic code at Los Alamos
 National Laboratory in New Mexico, stressed that along with the
 viruses that cause illness, the human body is awash in "hundreds of
 thousands" of virus fragments, most of them passed harmlessly down
 through the evolution of the species.  Dots on a TV Screen June
 Osborne, a Michigan public health expert who presides over the
 National Commission on AIDS, pointed out that doctors may be turning
 up atypical "AIDS cases" because they are using sophisticated new
 probes.  These "new" cases of immune-system collapse may materialize
 "like the dots on a TV screen -- they are there because you're
 looking for them."
    However, the 39-year-old Dr. Laurence wasn't willing to
 soft-pedal his message.  "We have to look back to 1981," at the start
 of the AIDS epidemic, he said in an interview.  "Know your sex
 partner and practice safe sex.  People should also bank their own
 blood.  If you travel in a country with a high incidence of AIDS,
 take your own blood with you."
    Back in the U. S., Warner C. Green, professor of medicine at the
 University of California, San Francisco, advised "cautious
 skepticism" toward the reports from Amsterdam.  "One doesn't want to
 get bent out of shape and cause a public alarm" that forces changes
 in health policies on the basis of such scant evidence, he said.
    Regarding the reports of AIDS-like illness in the 30 or so
 patients who tested negative for HIV, the top AIDS researcher said,
 "I'm betting that in six months we'll view this as a new strain of
 the garden-variety HIV" that is triggering patients to produce
 antibodies that simply aren't detected by present tests.

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