Women Getting AIDS Through Sex Double in Five Years, Study Finds
The proportion of women getting AIDS from male sexual partners has more than doubled in five years, indicating that women may underestimate their risk of getting the fatal disease, a new study says.
Only 12% of women diagnosed with acquired immune deficiency syndrome in 1982--the first full year U.S. medical authorities tracked it--got it from male sex partners, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said.
By late last year, 26% of women getting AIDS were contracting it from men, Dr. Mary E. Guinan and public health specialist Ann Hardy reported in Friday’s Journal of the American Medical Assn.
50% Are Drug Users
Drug abuse remains the largest single way the viral disease spreads to women, accounting for just over 50% of cases, the study said.
Many women may be unaware of their risk of catching AIDS from men during sex, and they need to learn about that risk and the possibility of passing the fatal, incurable illness to their fetuses, the study and an accompanying editorial said.
Seventy per cent of the 1,819 women in the study were black or Latino, the researchers said, but an accompanying editorial said news stories dramatizing the AIDS risk typically picture whites.
By focusing on whites, minorities may be receiving “the misimpression that AIDS in heterosexuals is a white disease, just as previous reports conveyed the false impression that AIDS is a gay disease,” said the editorial by Dr. Constance B. Wofsy of the University of California, San Francisco.
