Soviet AIDS Toll from Contaminated Syringe Rises to 49

MOSCOW — The number of mothers and children known to have become infected with the fatal AIDS virus through an unsterilized syringe used by nurses at a provincial hospital has risen to 49, Soviet health officials said Friday.

Officials expect to find several more victims as the investigation continues, Valentin I. Pokrovsky, president of the Academy of Sciences, said.

At a news briefing on an international conference in Moscow on acquired immune deficiency syndrome, Pokrovsky said 21 of the 49 already identified are children.

He blamed the tragedy in Elista, a city near the Caspian Sea, on health workers who used the same syringe to inject drugs into the intravenous feeding catheters of numerous patients.

The Soviet Union suffers an extreme shortage of syringes. The country produced just 30 million disposable syringes last year, while health workers dispensed 3 billion injections, said Deputy Health Minister Alexander Kondrusev.

Nurses are supposed to sterilize their reusable syringes between patients, but this apparently was not done in Elista, he said. Nor do disposable syringes solve the problem, because they too are often used repeatedly, he said.

“We still have cases of health workers using syringes not properly boiled, or simply changing needles,” he said.

The Elista case began when a Soviet man contracted AIDS in Africa, then came home and transmitted it to his wife. She or her child apparently was a patient in the maternity hospital last June when the infections began.