Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1989. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - Tuesday, June 6, 1989
Randy Shilts, National Correspondent
-- Sixty-two percent of the men in a New York City homeless shelter tested positive for AIDS antibodies. .
-- The 30 percent infection rate among homeless drug addicts in Chicago was nearly twice the overall 17 percent infection rate among drug abusers in that city. .
-- About one in eight people tested at a Miami homeless shelter were infected with the AIDS virus, including 9.8 percent of homeless people who were neither gay men nor intravenous drug abusers. The New York and Chicago studies found that homeless drug addicts are far more likely to be sharing needles with other addicts, leaving themselves more vulnerable to infection. Of the 169 homeless men studied in New York, 54 percent were drug abusers, 23 percent were homosexual men and 15 percent were both drug users and homosexual. Most of the gay men were young runaways.
The homeless-AIDS problem also afflicts San Francisco.
John Watters, a researcher with the University of California at San Francisco who works in conjunction with the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, said unpublished studies have found that about 15 percent of homeless heterosexuals in San Francisco are infected with the AIDS virus. The rate among homeless blacks is higher, he said.
Researchers also expressed alarm over "epidemic" infection of 6 percent to 8 percent in surveys of presumably low-risk male and female patients from Bronx Lebanon Hospital in New York City and University Hospital in Newark, N.J. Also, the hospitals' infection rates were about 20 percent for men ages 25 to 44 hospitalized with conditions thought unlikely to be related to infection with HIV.
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