The Deadly Spread of AIDS

Homosexuals, Haitians and hemophiliacs fall victim

It began suddenly, in the autumn of 1979. Young homosexual men with a history of promiscuity started showing up at the medical clinics of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco with a bizarre array of ailments. Some had Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a deadly disease rarely seen except in drug-weakened cancer and transplant patients. Others bore the purplish skin lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer that is usually confined to elderly men of Mediterranean extraction and young males in Equatorial Africa. Still others had developed strange fungal infections or other rare cancers. All had one thing in common: an immune system so severely impaired that they were living playgrounds for infectious agents. As soon as one bug could be brought under control, these patients would fall prey to another, gradually wasting away.

It has been 16 months since the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta began compiling statistics on acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS, as the disease is now known. During that period, AIDS has struck 547 people in the U.S. and at least 21 abroad, killing 232, more than toxic shock syndrome and the Philadelphia outbreak of Legionnaire's disease combined. "This is a very, very dramatic illness," says Dr. James Curran, head of the 120-member CDC task force on AIDS. "I think we can say quite assuredly that it is new." What makes AIDS especially alarming, says Curran, is that its incidence is rising, from one case a day in the first six months, to two or three cases a day in the past three months. What is more, the epidemic has spread beyond the homosexual community into several other segments of the U.S. population.

AIDS victims fall into four general groups (with some overlapping):

> 75% are homosexual men. Most are Caucasians in their 30s and 40s with a college education, incomes averaging $20,000, a history of prior infection with mononucleosis and venereal disease, and a sex life that has included many partners, more than 500 in several cases.

> 25% are intravenous-drug abusers, also in their 30s, but usually black or Hispanic, heterosexual, and with a high school education at most. Of this group, 19 are women.

> 6% are Haitian immigrants, three of them female, most of them heterosexuals and nonaddicts. All are believed to have been infected before coming to the U.S.

> .5% (three in all) are hemophiliacs who are not gay, Haitian or drug addicted.