Study Sees No Risk to Families of AIDS Patients
Medical evidence continues to mount that the deadly infectious disease AIDS is not transmitted by casual exposure, even to family members who have prolonged intimate but not sexual contact with a disease victim.
Researchers at the Montefiore Medical Center of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City report in today’s New England Journal of Medicine that household contact with AIDS patients poses “minimal or no risk of infection” with the virus that causes the disease.
An accompanying editorial calls upon physicians, armed with such new knowledge, to help quell the public “hysteria” over the casual transmission of acquired immune deficiency syndrome and prevent attempts to discriminate against people in the “so-called high-risk groups.”
“We need to support public and medical officials who oppose universal screening, quarantine, the exclusion of students from classrooms, and the removal of employees, including health care workers, from the workplace,” wrote Dr. Merle A. Sande, chief of medicine at San Francisco General Hospital.
The principal author of the study, Dr. Gerald A. Friedland, said: “There is a misconception that a very serious disease must be easy to catch. Our study provides powerful support for the idea that the AIDS virus is difficult to transmit.”
Study of Families
The researchers based their conclusions on a study of 68 children and 33 adults, such as brothers, sisters or parents, who had lived in the same household as 39 patients with AIDS or an AIDS-related condition for at least three months. Many had shared items such as combs, drinking glasses or clothes with an AIDS patient; 83% had kissed a patient on the cheek and 17% on the lips.
The one child who had evidence of infection with the virus had probably acquired it from her mother, an AIDS victim, before birth, the researchers found. The other 100 household contacts all tested negative. Follow-up examinations are in progress.
As of Monday, 17,001 cases of AIDS had been reported to the federal Centers for Disease Control and 8,801 patients had died.
The New York City study--like previous, less extensive studies of family members and detailed studies of health care workers--supports the prevailing view among medical experts that transmission of AIDS requires injection of contaminated blood or blood products or intimate sexual contact. An infected mother may also transmit the virus to her unborn offspring.
Close to 75% of the AIDS patients studied were heterosexual intravenous drug users; 71% of their household contacts were classed as Hispanic and 18% black. Most households had annual incomes below $10,000.
San Francisco General’s Sande, who is also chairman of the University of California’s Task Force on AIDS, said there was “every opportunity for the virus to be spread within the family if such transmission was likely.” He said the study should reassure health care workers, AIDS patients, their families and the public because infection control procedures, such as the use of gowns, gloves or disinfectants, were “obviously not employed” in the family setting.
Particles in Blood
One reason that AIDS is difficult to transmit may be the relatively low concentration of infectious particles in the blood, according to Sande. For example, a typical AIDS patient has 10,000 viral particles per milliliter of blood, compared with up to 10 trillion viral particles per milliliter for a patient with hepatitis B, which causes liver inflammation.
The AIDS virus can attack the body’s immune system, leaving the victim vulnerable to a variety of infections and tumors. People who acquire the virus may not actually develop AIDS, but they are considered infectious to others.
