Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1987. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Chicago Tribune - Sunday, November 15 1987
One official said the report would "scale down" the widely quoted projection that as many as 1.5 million Americans are infected with HIV, the virus suspected of causing AIDS.
"It's going to open some eyes," the official said of the still uncompleted report, ordered by President Reagan nearly six months ago. "It's going to be a lower number, and it's going to show that the spread has slowed down drastically."
A second administration official said U.S. Public Health Service epidemiologists "haven't committed themselves to a particular number."
Sources said the range of infection discussed at a White House meeting last week was "from a low of 350,000 to a high of one million," considerably below the range of one million to 1.5 million set by government researchers in the summer of 1986.
The second official said Public Health Service administrators had acknowledged privately last month that the infection "is not spreading beyond the existing risk groups and a small range just outside -- sex partners of intravenous drug users and so forth."
A key element in the new, lower AIDS estimate, according to those officials and others, will be so far unreleased data showing that the trend of HIV infections among prospective military recruits has remained essentially flat during the last six months.
As the increase in both AIDS cases and new HIV infections begins to level off among homosexual men in New York and San Francisco, and among heterosexuals nationwide, a consensus is also building outside of government that the current AIDS estimates are too high.
"I'm sure they'll come out lower this time around," said Andrew Moss, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco.
He said that "1.5 million is too large, and the case predictions for the next few years are also too large. . . . It's a very political number, but I think one needs to be realistic about these numbers.
"People fall in love with big numbers to crank up a problem. The media likes big numbers, too. The down side is that, when you get the real numbers and they aren't so big, people minimize it."
DESCRIPTORS: statistic; aids
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CT871102
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