Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Similarly, the sex therapists argue that the chance of catching an AIDS infection from donated blood is not 1 in 40,000, as the blood-bank industry now claims, but 1 in 5,418. They derive that figure from the highly inflated statistic of 3 million AIDS virus carriers. Even then, they do not allow for the fact that 80% of the nation's 18.8 million blood units come from repeat donors, who have a much lower rate of infection...
First there was the news everybody wanted to hear: a New York physician writing in Cosmopolitan reassured women that there is practically no risk of contracting AIDS through ordinary vaginal or oral sex, even with an infected man. The vaginal secretions produced during sexual arousal, he wrote, keep the virus from penetrating the vaginal walls. His explanation: "Nature has arranged this so that sex will feel good and be good for you." Then came the news nobody wanted to hear: Sex Gurus William Masters and Virginia Johnson proclaimed in their new book about AIDS that "the epidemic has clearly broken...
...anything is clear about the AIDS epidemic, it is that anal sex among homosexual men and needle sharing among drug addicts are still the major ways the AIDS virus is transmitted in the U.S. American 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...
...these questions, and that is part of the problem; it is misleading, and perhaps even dangerous, to pretend that there are. The best advice, most AIDS experts agree, is to use condoms and cut down on the number of sex partners. Reason: promiscuity increases the 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...
...many unknowns. Research is making it abundantly clear that people differ, often inexplicably, in their vulnerability to the virus and in their tendency to transmit it to others by various routes. An AIDS carrier's infectivity -- his or her ability to pass the virus on -- may vary over time. Only now are researchers beginning to understand these differences and their implications for preventing the spread of the disease...