Newsday - May 19, 1992
Laurie Garrett
More than half of the poor people in and around New York City who are infected with the AIDS virus are also infected with tuberculosis germs, according to a federal study released yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Lung Association in Miami.
A second report shows that among a New York City study group of welfare recipients who were either alcoholics or intravenous drug users, many were converting from infection to active TB at an alarming rate. Many are developing TB even though their skin tests are negative.
Dr. Fred Gordin, who practices in Washington, D.C., led a 17-center federal study for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of 4,314 indigent people who are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS.
Nearly a thousand people in the group of welfare recipients were from greater New York, notably from Harlem and Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Centers, the Hill Health Center in New Haven and the Addiction Treatment Center in Brooklyn.
Skin tests of the New York-area volunteers were 28 percent positive for TB infection, compared to a national infection rate among HIV-positive people of less than 8 percent, Gordin said. But it has long been known that most people with HIV fail to respond to a TB skin test because their immune systems are devastated by the HIV virus. So Gordin used a combination of general skin tests and a mathematical model to figure out what percentage of the patients were actually infected with tuberculosis.
The result was an alarming 51 percent for New York area volunteers.
"It is really very scary in New York," Gordin said in an interview. Indeed, many of the New York area volunteers have already gone past mere infection to active tuberculosis disease.
"We found 10.2 percent of the New York area cohort[study group] have actually had TB already, which is mind-boggling," Gordin said. "It's what you'd expect to see in a Third World country."
Most of the New York area participants in Gordin's study were poor, heterosexual males and 80 percent are drug users. In contrast, about 76 percent of the HIV-positive volunteers from other parts of the country were gay and bisexual men.
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