Word: risk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...victims are still overwhelmingly male: 92%. And though there is no doubt that heterosexual intercourse between intravenous drug users or bisexual men and their lovers is contributing to the spread of the disease, the number of AIDS cases traced to sex between men and women not in these high-risk groups is very low -- about 4% -- and has remained stable. But just what is the risk? How contagious is AIDS? What are the odds of picking up the virus from a single sex act if one's partner turns out to be infected...
...likelihood of encountering the virus as well as other sexually transmitted diseases that may increase susceptibility to AIDS. Some people have picked up the virus from a single sexual encounter, while others have escaped despite hundreds of sexual exposures to an infected spouse. No one knows why. The risk figures that Masters and Johnson offer -- a 1-in-400 risk of a man transmitting the virus to a woman through an act of unprotected vaginal intercourse, and a 1-in-600 risk of a woman to a man -- are supposedly based on a series of assumptions and statistical projections first...
...became infected should have been those who had had sex most often. But frequency of intercourse did not seem to matter. Says Researcher James Goedert of the National Cancer Institute: "The study demonstrates that the infected population gets more infectious as time passes, and that the level of risk increases as time goes on." That led Goedert and his colleagues to speculate that early treatment with AZT, the only approved anti-AIDS drug known to inhibit replication of the virus, may actually make AIDS less contagious. "That's among the most urgent questions we have to answer," says Samuel Broder...
...levels or not at all. Saliva is a hostile environment for the AIDS virus, explains Jay Levy of the University of California at San Francisco. It will kill half the viruses exposed to it within 30 minutes. Scientists are also skeptical about the danger of oral sex. But that risk is practically impossible to measure because most couples who engage in oral sex also have intercourse, and there is no way to analyze the risks separately...
None of this is to say that the risk of transmitting AIDS through heterosexual intercourse is not a serious one. Exactly how the virus is passed along, though, is still murky. Many researchers strongly suspect that an infected man can more easily pass the virus to a female sexual partner than vice versa. Certainly more women have got the disease from men than men from women: women make up 75% of those who have contracted AIDS through heterosexual intercourse. Researchers have speculated that the virus is more concentrated in semen than in vaginal secretions and that the mucous membranes lining...