Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1995. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Newsday - February 1, 1995
Laurie Garrett. Staff Correspondent
A 1992-94 study of more than 1,000 people admitted to the emergency room or inpatient service of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital found that 47.7 percent of those who tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus probably were infected through heterosexual sex.
Of those people, a quarter had lived in a country where HIV is primarily a heterosexual disease - typically in the Caribbean; another 11.4 percent had had sex with an intravenous drug user; and 4.5 percent were involved sexually with a person who came from a country where AIDS was rampant.
Further, the Bronx researchers found that, compared to people who were not infected, patients who tested HIV-positive were three times more likely to have had sex with a drug user. They were also more likely to be African-American or black Hispanic. And they were far less likely to be married.
Two other New York City studies, conducted jointly by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and by the city Department of Health, produced further evidence of heterosexual spread of the virus. One study showed that heterosexual transmission from women to men increased in New York City between 1992 and 1994 by 47 percent. It also found that in the same period, AIDS cases among 13to 19-year-olds climbed by 4 percent.
The other study, at the city's sexually transmitted disease clinics, monitored 700 people for infection over a three-year period and further confirmed that heterosexual transmission was the leading cause of new HIV infections in 1994.
Department of Health researcher Victor Coronado said that the heterosexual increase was real but that its size was exaggerated by New York authorities' previous skepticism about claims of heterosexual infection. "In the past if a man said he got the virus heterosexually we said, uh-huh, sure," Coronado said.
By 1993, however, the city started keeping the heterosexual statistics seriously. And then they saw the jump in numbers. Last year 233 men in New York City had the AIDS virus as a result of sex with an infected woman.
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