Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...female transmission is bound to occur more often simply because of the mechanics of vaginal intercourse. Harvard Virologist Martin Hirsch, however, notes that herpes and syphilis appear to travel equally well in either direction between the sexes. Hirsch thinks the only reason more women have contracted the AIDS virus from men than the other way around is that many more men now have the disease. As more women become carriers, he suspects, they will infect their partners. "There is no doubt," says Dr. Margaret Fischl, an AIDS researcher at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "that this virus, when...
...Africa, where it is estimated that more than 2 million people have been infected with the AIDS virus, the disease strikes men and women equally. AIDS is spread among adult Africans primarily by vaginal intercourse, and it is rampant in the large, overcrowded cities of central and western Africa. Most AIDS researchers, however, now dismiss the suggestion that Africa might serve as a model for the heterosexual spread of AIDS in the U.S. For one thing, promiscuity and prostitution are common in parts of Africa, and general standards of hygiene and medical care are low. Scientists believe widespread venereal diseases...
...inextricably linked to AIDS, where pregnancies among teenagers have 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...
...Baltimore researchers were disturbed to find that one-third of the men carrying the AIDS virus and nearly half the women had no idea that they had engaged in any behavior that put them at risk. The proposed solutions: more AIDS screening and personal counseling at clinics for sexually transmitted diseases, greater efforts to eradicate syphilis and other diseases that lead to genital ulcerations, and more education about safe sex and the dangers of drug abuse. With AIDS, there will be no quick fixes or startling innovations, just the desperate, backbreaking efforts required to persuade people to make small...