Medicine: Opportunistic Diseases

Medicine

A puzzling new syndrome afflicts homosexual men

Kaposi's sarcoma is a rare cancer that appears as violet patches on the skin and infiltrates the digestive and lymph systems. In the past, its victims have been mainly children in equatorial Africa and elderly people of Jewish or Mediterranean extraction. But now the disease is taking an alarming toll on another distinct group, American homosexual males. In the past six months, the disease that usually afflicts fewer than two people out of 3 million Americans has stricken 95 individuals, more than 90% of them homosexual men,...