Chicago Tribune (CT) - TUESDAY June 21, 1988 Edition: SPORTS FINAL Section: NEWS Page: 3 Word Count: 417
Jon Van, Chicago Tribune

The case, reported in the current issue of Lancet, the British medical journal, is believed to be the earliest instance of European AIDS to be documented.

The infections, reported by Dr. Stig Froland, Dr. Paul Jenum and colleagues, demonstrates that acquired immune deficiency syndrome occurred in isolated instances around the world long before public health officials noticed it eight years ago.

In the Norwegian case, the father, a sailor born in 1946, was first seen by Froland in 1966. He suffered from general swelling of the lymph glands, respiratory infections and other complaints.

The sailor's wife, born in 1943, began to experience persistent fever, respiratory infections and several other symptoms beginning in 1967.

A daughter born to the couple in 1967 developed normally for two years, but then got a series of bacterial and viral infections.

All three died in 1976.

"The seaman had visited several ports during the course of his work, including ports in Africa," Jenum said. "He had been treated at least twice before for gonorrhea, so we know he had been exposed to sexually transmitted disease. We cannot prove anything beyond that, but it seems most likely that the husband was infected during a visit to a foreign port and he later passed the disease sexually to his wife. The daughter was likely born with the infection, inheriting it from her mother."

Two older daughters of the couple, born before 1967, show no signs of immune deficiency, Jenum said, and test negative for AIDS antibodies. This case was discovered because when Froland was a young physician, he happened to see the sailor at a local hospital, Jenum said. Froland, now head of clinical immunology at Norway's National Hospital, remembered the family because he had invested great effort trying to find the source of their disease.

Froland published an article about the family in a Scandinavian medical journal in 1986. He noted that their clinical symptoms strongly suggested AIDS, although antibody tests for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of AIDS, proved negative at the time.

But early this year Jenum suggested to Froland that blood samples from the family, which were stored in a freezer, be analyzed anew using the more sensitive tests now available. These tests show clearly that all three family members were infected with HIV, Jenum said.

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