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; Thursday, September 10, 1987.
The Office of Technology Assessment report was based on a July meeting of 18 scientists, including two from Florida who have suggested that AIDS probably is transmitted by mosquitoes.
The study quoted objections by Mark Whiteside and Caroline MacLeod of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in North Miami Beach to previous dismissals of their contention that mosquitoes have contributed to a concentration of AIDS cases around Belle Glade in Palm Beach County.
Yet the report did not embrace their arguments. It said, in line with declarations by the Centers for Disease Control and the surgeon general, that for the AIDS-causing virus "the major routes of transmission in the United States are clearly related to sexual practices," intravenous drug use and injections of blood.
Experiments designed to show whether the AIDS virus, or HIV, can survive long enough in a blood-sucking insect to be transmitted "have shown that it is . . . possible," the study said.
But so many conditions would have to be present that "the probability of insect transmission of HIV is extremely low."
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