San Francisco Chronicle - The Voice of the West, 901 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94119; 12 Feb 1996, p. A3
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Despite a few tiny and tentative signs of progress against the disease in Africa and Asia and increasingly successful AIDS prevention efforts in America, infection rates and deaths, particularly in the world's developing nations, continue to rise, experts told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Baltimore this week.

By the beginning of this year, AIDS has stricken at least 4.5 million adults and children worldwide, while 18.5 million adults and 1.5 million children have been infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, said Dr. Thomas C. Quinn. He is a federal researcher who has combined estimates from the World Health Organization with reports from national health agencies worldwide and a Harvard team headed by Dr. Jonathan Mann, former AIDS chief for the WHO.

In a look at the global AIDS picture, Quinn said that, although the best estimates probably understate the dimensions of the epidemic, at least 10,000 new HIV infections are undoubtedly appearing every day and nearly 60 percent of those infections are occurring in the developing world.

Epidemic control measures, including the widespread free distribution of condoms in Thailand's brothels and to the general public in Zaire, are curbing the epidemic's spread in some urban centers of those two countries, but elsewhere the disease is spreading unabated, Quinn said.

And although in America the impact of AIDS is still heaviest among men who have sex with men and among intravenous drug users, heterosexual transmission of the virus is increasing rapidly, Quinn said. AIDS cases among women, teenagers and young adults also have increased, he said.

Particularly puzzling to AIDS control specialists, Quinn noted, is that eight distinct varieties of HIV have emerged separately on different continents -- a problem that promises to pose difficulties in developing vaccines and anti-viral therapies.

The United States and Europe are seeing the spread of one such group of viruses. East African nations are seeing two others, and in southern Africa a separate HIV group is most prevalent. In Southeast Asia, still another HIV group has been dominant since 1987, he said.

By now, HIV infections throughout Asia, where heterosexual transmission is the rule, have hit an estimated 3.5 million or more people, and the rate of increase is now greater there than in any other region, Quinn said. Southeast Asian nations -- particularly Thailand, Burma and India -- "have witnessed the greatest explosive growth of the epidemic anywhere," he said.
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