The Associated Press; Tuesday, December 16, 1997; 4:33 p.m. EST
Joann Loviglio, Associated Press Writer

The symptoms can appear within three to four weeks after a person is infected with HIV, according to the study published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association. It takes three to six months before HIV antibodies are found in the bloodstream.

Knowing the symptoms could be helpful in developing countries where high-tech methods of early diagnosis are unavailable or unaffordable.

People in the very early stages of HIV are highly infectious and unaware they have the virus, so they are more likely to have unprotected sex, said Robert Bollinger, associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, one of the researchers.

The study looked at 3,874 people in India who were being treated for other sexually transmitted diseases and at first tested negative for HIV antibodies.

Researchers screened the patients for an HIV protein called p24 antigen, which appears within a couple of weeks of infection. Having p24 antigen is proof of HIV infection before antibodies appear in the blood.

In the study, patients with a recent fever were five times more likely to be infected with HIV; those with joint pain were six times more likely; and those with nights sweats were nine times more likely to have HIV.

Various other symptoms showed no significant connection to HIV. The study did not examine the symptoms in combination.

"These studies should help scientists and physicians develop better strategies to prevent HIV infection," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which also took part in the research.

"This information also should be useful to investigators studying HIV and AIDS in other developing countries, which bear the brunt of the global AIDS pandemic."

Dr. Marv Reitz, an AIDS researcher at the University of Maryland's Institute for Human Virology, said: "The value of the findings is that if (other testing methods) aren't available, like if you're in a Third World country, you can simply look for those symptoms."

The discovery conflicts with previous findings that up to 90 percent of people with early HIV infection have symptoms such as swollen lymph glands, sore throat and oral thrush. The new study found only 47 percent of HIV-infected people had such symptoms.

Both findings may be true because the virus has different strains, Reitz said.

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