Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Striking new research, published last week in the quarterly journal AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses, may help explain why some AIDS carriers can go on having unprotected sex for years without passing the virus to a regular partner. Although it is known that enough of the virus appears in the bloodstream shortly after infection to spread the disease via blood transfusions, sexual transmission is a different matter. The new study, of 24 hemophiliac AIDS carriers, shows that despite repeated sexual contact without condoms, the wives or steady female partners of these men generally remained free of the virus for several...
Although they may have finally contracted the virus simply because of repeated exposure, researchers doubt it. Had that been the case, the women who 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...
...study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association offered other explanations for why some people become infected after sexual exposure and others do not. Of 25 husbands and 55 wives of patients who acquired the virus from blood transfusions, only two husbands and ten wives became infected in more than two years. None of the couples used condoms. Although a higher proportion of wives than husbands contracted the virus, the difference was not considered statistically significant...
...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...