Chicago Tribune (CT) - FRIDAY January 1, 1988 Edition: SPORTS FINAL Section: NEWS Page: 14 Word Count: 646
Jon Van, Science writer

This is a composite of stories from the various editions.

TEXT:

Becoming infected with the AIDS virus through heterosexual intercourse is a highly unpredictable and poorly understood process, concludes a government health study in Friday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study found cases where people didn't become infected despite being exposed to the virus hundreds of times through heterosexual intercourse, and it also found a case where a single exposure infected a person.

The study focused on the spouses of heterosexuals who had become infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from blood transfusions.

It provides scientific documentation for what clinicians treating AIDS patients have seen in their practices: Some people are much more likely to spread the disease than others, and some are more easily infected.

Reasons for these highly variable heterosexual AIDS infection rates are unknown, but health officials speculate they may be linked to variations in virus concentrations carried by different individuals or to infection factors that change as the disease progresses.

The study was conducted by researchers from the federal Centers for Disease Control; the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and the New York City Health Department. The study focused on 106 families of patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

In 80 families, spouses had continued having sex with infected family members, and in most cases did so without condoms. In the other 26 families, spouses didn't have sexual intercourse after infection occurred.

Among the spouses at risk for infection, 2 out of 25 husbands in the study and 10 of 55 wives became infected. One of the women became infected after only one sexual contact and another became infected after just eight contacts.

Yet among the 45 women who didn't become infected, 11 each reported having had more than 200 contacts with their infected partners.

"These data indicate that the risk of HIV transmission is not simply a function of the number of sexual contacts with an infected person," noted Dr. Thomas Peterman and his colleagues who conducted the study.

The report did not indicate how many people in the study who contracted the AIDS virus went on to contract AIDS. When a person tests positive for antibodies to the AIDS virus, he or she can pass the infection to others even if no symptoms of illness are experienced. Doctors don't know how many infected people will go on to develop AIDS, but experience suggests that one- third to one-half of people infected with the AIDS virus will develop symptoms of immune deficiency within seven years after their initial infection.

The researchers chose to study heterosexuals who were infected by blood transfusions for several reasons. The people in the study were very much like the general public. They didn't engage in high-risk behaviors such as homosexual sex or intravenous drug use that usually are associated with AIDS.

Also, because the infections came from blood transfusions, it was possible for scientists to pinpoint the date when each AIDS patient became infected. Though the patients were unaware they were being infected when they received the blood transfusions, their subsequent illness gave researchers hindsight ability to learn about how many sexual contacts the patients had after becoming infected.

Besides documenting the uncertain nature of AIDS infection spread through heterosexual intercourse, the study also reconfirms what several previous studies also have found: casual contact among family members with relatives who have AIDS doesn't spread the infection.

Among several spouses, children and other relatives living with the AIDS patients who had no sexual contact with them, there was no spread of the infection.

The relatives in the study had a total of 140 person-years contact with AIDS patients with no risk of infection.

This study again supports the finding that any form of casual contact with AIDS patients, such as in offices, schools or social settings, poses no threat of infection.

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