Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1987. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The Associated Press; Wednesday, June 03, 1987
"This epidemic has just started," cautioned Dr. Jonathan Mann of the World Health Organization.
Unlike every other major health problem, AIDS strikes sexually active adults in their prime working years.
"The selective involvement of young and middle-aged adults, including business and government people and members of other social, economic and political elites, leads to a potential for economic and political destabilization in areas of the developing world severely affected by HIV," the AIDS virus, Mann said. "What political system could withstand for long the destabilizing influence of a 20 or 25 percent or higher HIV infection rate among young adults?"
Mann, who is head of the health organization's AIDS program, spoke at the Third International Conference on AIDS.
Once people catch the AIDS virus, they are believed to be infected for life. Just how many of them actually will get the acquired immune deficiency syndrome is unclear, although more than a third of the infected people in one San Francisco study have contracted the lethal disease, which attacks the body's ability to resist other infections and diseases.
Experts can only roughly guess how many outwardly healthy people are infected and capable of passing on the virus during sex, childbirth or sharing hypodermic needles.
In the United States, Dr. James Curran, head of the AIDS program at the Centers for Disease Control, said the best estimate is that 1.5 million people are infected. This would mean that perhaps one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 50 carry the virus.
By 1991, he said, AIDS is likely to be the second leading cause of premature death, after accidents, among American men.
"Let us all remember that each number represents a person," he said.
The number of people infected is extremely difficult to assess, since widespread antibody testing -- the only practical way to spot infection -- has not been done.
In Central Africa, where the epidemic is believed to have started, Dr. I.S. Okware said one study suggests that perhaps nearly 2 percent of the population is becoming infected annually.
"At the rate the disease is spreading, it is only a matter of time before the countries that don't report any cases feel the full uncompromising ferocity of this disease," said Okware, head of the national AIDS committee in Uganda.
In other developments at the conference:
* Cleaning used hypodermic needles with bleach, dish detergent, rubbing alcohol, vodka or wine can kill the AIDS virus, thus reducing the high risk of infection of drug addicts from dirty needles, said a report by Dr. Sunita Jain of the University of California, Davis. The report found that beer and cola were ineffective in killing the virus.
* Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said his group has performed 10 bone marrow transplant operations between identical twins this year but that it is too early to give results. The therapy's purpose is to suppress the virus with drugs while rebuilding the patient's immune system with new cells produced by the marrow.
Curran said that one of the most alarming aspects of the epidemic in the United States is the growing number of young women who unknowingly became infected heterosexually and pass the disease on to their unborn children.
"The United States has been relatively spared from pediatric AIDS, compared to many countries on the continent of Africa," Curran said. "I hope we can do something to prevent this problem before it gets even greater."
About 500 AIDS cases have been reported in American children, and 60 percent are thought to have gotten the disease from their mothers before birth.
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