Subject: U. S. Agency Publishes Its First Report On Five AIDS-Like, Negative-HIV Cases 
Date: Published: 7/31/92 (69 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Technology & Health:
    U. S. Agency Publishes Its First Report
    On Five AIDS-Like, Negative-HIV Cases
    ----
    By Marilyn Chase
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    The country's top disease-tracking agency published its first
 formal report of five cases of people with AIDS-like illness who
 tested negative for the human immunodeficiency virus.
    The Centers for Disease Control, based in Atlanta, also called a
 meeting for mid-August to assess the case reports.  The CDC had
 promised the report after Jeffrey Laurence of Cornell Medical School
 in New York discussed five such cases at the international AIDS
 conference in Amsterdam last week.
    The CDC's report lists five diverse cases of people with
 suppressed immune systems, including a 70-year-old married man with
 no risk factors for AIDS who came down with pneumonia and a
 58-year-old woman who had several blood transfusions and developed
 pneumonia and gynecological infections.  The woman had one positive
 test for AIDS antibodies -- which now is presumed to have been false
 positive -- though she and the other patients later tested negative
 for HIV by several more definitive methods, the CDC said.
    The agency said the five patients are among 26 such cases so far.
 But the CDC emphasized the case reports still lack proof of
 "epidemic linkage," or transmission of the condition to others.
    The CDC has asked doctors to submit any similar case-reports and
 dispatched surveillance teams to New York City for follow-up, James
 Curran, the CDC's AIDS chief, said in an interview yesterday.  But
 nothing definitive has surfaced to lend credence to fears of a new
 virus.
    "I haven't gotten anything that puts us much further than we were
 in Amsterdam," Dr. Curran said.  "We're hoping that by publishing
 these cases and holding a meeting, we'll push the process along and
 get at the truth.  But so far there's been more public concern than
 scientific data."
    In New York, Dr. Laurence said in a telephone interview he's now
 aware of "roughly 40 such cases.... I think they may be apples
 and oranges but we really don't know."
    Tomorrow, in the Aug. 1 issue of the British medical journal
 Lancet, Dr. Laurence will publish details of his five patients.  His
 report will note that two of them showed signs of an enzyme (reverse
 transcriptase) crucial to the replication of retroviruses, the class
 of viruses of which HIV is a member.
    The presence of an enzyme could signify that a virus other than
 HIV is present.  However, Dr. Laurence played down the significance
 of this.  "There's reverse transcriptase activity in a lot of things
 that didn't turn out," he said.  And he added that the Lancet report
 was fully previewed in Amsterdam.
    In the meantime, experts struggled to understand the possible
 relationship between the Laurence and the CDC cases, and a report
 from Sudhir Gupta of the University of California at Irvine about
 virus-like particles in an elderly woman with an impaired immune
 system, and her daughter.  So frequently are such particles reported
 in the medical literature, that one expert said this week:  "There
 are more of these sightings than Elvis."
    Separately, the National Institutes of Health reported that it
 will screen the blood of laboratory workers for simian
 immunodeficiency virus (SIV), or monkey AIDS, after two workers
 became infected after being stuck with a needle or exposed to blood
 through cracked skin.

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