Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1989. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - Thursday November 23, 1989
Doctors said the cluster of infection, spotted in Belgium and originating with a man from Africa, is the largest to be documented among heterosexuals since the epidemic emerged almost a decade ago.
Doctors who traced the spread said it should serve as a warning to women who believe that they can avoid the AIDS virus by limiting themselves to only a few sexual partners. In this case, the man himself may have been a "high disseminator" -- meaning that his semen contained a high concentration of the AIDS virus, or the virus strain he carried may have been unusually virulent, the doctors said.
"Emphasizing only sexual relations with multiple partners as a risk factor for women may be irrelevant and even counterproductive since it implies that the absence of multiple partners makes women 'safe,' " the doctors wrote.
They said middle-class women who believe that they are at low risk because they don't have sex with drug addicts or bisexuals or engage in other high-risk practices may have a false sense of security.
Dr. Nathan Clumeck, a physician at St. Pierre University Hospital in Brussels, was principal author of the report in today's New England Journal of Medicine.
Research in the case began in 1985, when a Belgian woman in Antwerp was found to have AIDS-related symptoms. She said an African man was the only person from whom she could have caught the virus.
About the same time, two other Belgian women and an African woman in Brussels were found to carry HIV, the AIDS virus. All of them named the same man as a possible source of infections.
Doctors interviewed the man and obtained the names of 19 women with whom he had sex over the previous three years. Eighteen of the women agreed to be tested and 11 turned out to be infected. These 11 named eight other male sex partners, and one of these men was also infected with the human immunodeficiency virus.
Clumeck said the cluster is probably larger, because the African man said he had about 20 sexual partners a year, but could not remember most of their names.
The man who spread the virus was a civil engineer from Central Africa who moved to Belgium in 1963 but traveled frequently in parts of Africa where the AIDS virus is common among heterosexuals. He died of AIDS-related illness in 1986.
Among the 11 infected women, three have AIDS, one has pre-AIDS illness and six have swollen lymph glands, a preliminary symptom of infection.
Among the 19 sexual partners, 12 were Europeans, eight were married and none used intravenous drugs. The women said they had one to four sexual partners during the previous three years. Two of those who got infected had sex just once with the African man.
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