Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...body of HPV, which can remain latent for decades. Thus the warts often recur. Worst of all, some types of HPV have been linked to cervical and other cancers; carriers of the virus who do not have warts are often unaware of the risk to themselves or their sexual partners...
...there were no differences in practices such as oral sex and French kissing among the couples; nor did it seem to matter how often they had intercourse. One wife became infected after only one exposure, and another after just eight. Yet eleven women remained uninfected after more than 200 sexual contacts. The researchers speculate that the originally infected spouses may have somehow differed in their ability to transmit the virus. Another possibility: their husbands and wives may have differed in susceptibility...
...J.A.M.A. study's failure to indict specific sexual practices supports laboratory findings that suggest, contrary to Masters and Johnson, that "deep" kissing is safe. The AIDS virus is present in saliva at extremely low 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...
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...
...become commonplace and where educational programs about safe sex either do not reach their intended audience or cannot cross cultural barriers. In January an article in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed a surprisingly high, 5.2% rate of AIDS virus infection among 4,028 patients attending clinics for sexually transmitted diseases in Baltimore. Most of the patients were black, and their infection rate was notably higher than the rate among whites. Intravenous drug abuse and sexual contact with a drug addict were important risk factors. So too was a history of syphilis in men and virally caused genital warts...