‘Silent’ AIDS Findings Met With Dismay

Reports of the apparent fallibility of the standard AIDS test--to which millions of Americans have turned for reassurance that they are not infected with the deadly virus--shocked many around the country Thursday and brought new uncertainty to an already baffling epidemic.

Experts and others said they were stunned and disheartened by reports of a new UCLA study of gay men who had engaged in high-risk sex. The study found that nearly one-quarter had carried the virus for up to three years without showing up in the standard antibody test for acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

“I find this probably the most depressing piece of news in the last two years of this epidemic,” said Dr. Neil Schram, an AIDS specialist in Los Angeles. “The scope of the infection within the gay male community may be significantly higher than we are assuming.”

In Orange County, some of the gay activists and doctors working to fight AIDS reacted with interest and concern--but not panic--to news that some people may carry the deadly disease even though they react negatively for the virus on the standard test.

Laguna Beach Mayor Robert F. Gentry, an AIDS activist whose “life partner” of 15 years recently died of AIDS, said he found the results of the UCLA study “very distressing.”

Gentry, who has never been tested for the disease and so is not sure whether he has it, said, “It’s very distressing to me to think about the possibility that they (men in the study) thought they were not infected and then turned out to be infected.”

Still, he noted that the research involved a select group of gay men who engaged in “high-risk” sexual activity.

“Maybe I’m in denial,” Gentry said. “But I’m going to assume it’s not applicable to everyone else. . . . I’m sure the rate (for contracting AIDS) is lower in the group not practicing high-risk sex than the group continuing to practice high-risk sex so much.”

“It’s another incredibly discouraging piece of news,” said Torie Osborn, executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. “The battle is hard enough without fighting enemies you can’t test for.”

AIDS telephone hot lines rang off the hook from Los Angeles to New York City, but there was little agreement on the study’s implications. Some said it underscored the limited value of the standard test while others said it underscored the need for repeated testing.

There was also some skepticism toward the findings within the gay community and among specialists. Wary of the ever-changing quality of information about the deadly disease, some said they had learned to approach all such news with caution.

“One of the big issues for everyone is how much contradictory information (there is) and how many grim statistics and how many new ‘cures,’ ” said Ed Wolf, a 40-year-old gay man in San Francisco who tested negative three years ago.

133 Men in Test

The study, published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved 133 gay men who, according to the standard AIDS test, were not infected. But using more sophisticated tests, not widely available, the researchers found that 31 of the men were in fact infected with the virus.

The study involved only men with an unusually high risk of infection--men who had repeatedly engaged in unprotected anal intercourse. The “silent infection” rate is likely to be much lower among other groups and among people who practice safer sex, experts said.

Other studies of silent infection have reached different conclusions, some researchers noted. For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found no convincing evidence of silent infections among heterosexual partners of people infected with the virus.

“We still have to see if this particular finding really can be extended to general populations,” said Dr. Martin Finn, medical director of Los Angeles County’s AIDS program office. Finn said it is impossible so far “to say what its total implication is.”

From New York City to Los Angeles, callers flooded AIDS telephone hot lines with questions about how to react to the news. Most of the calls came from people who had tested negative on the antibody test but suddenly found themselves doubting those results.

“We’ve had a few inquiries, half a dozen people or less who read the articles and they decided they wanted to get tested,” said Werner Kuhn, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center in Garden Grove. “But there doesn’t seem to be any panic.

“Maybe we have a better informed, less hysterical community” that realizes the article described a special group of gay men who continued to practice high-risk sex, Kuhn said.

At the AIDS Services Foundation in Costa Mesa, Executive Director Joel Miller said his agency hadn’t received any calls but “it’s kind of soon. . . . This is fresh in people’s minds and they don’t know what to make of it yet.”

Orange County epidemiologist Thomas Prendergast said his first reaction to reports of the UCLA study was that he wanted to read the article in the New England Journal of Medicine himself.

“I just don’t think it’s fair to try to make anything out of news which is given to us in such an unscientific form which defies analysis of its details,” Prendergast said.

But if reports of the journal article are accurate, Prendergast said, he is concerned about “whether or not we’ve developed tests that are so sensitive that we are actually picking up evidence of exposure” to the AIDS virus. Prendergast said he wondered whether a sophisticated test could now pick up evidence not only of actual infection but evidence that the AIDS virus was circulating for a time in a person’s bloodstream.

Dr. Sherman Williamson, a family practice physician Orange who treats many patients infected with the AIDS virus, said his reaction to the news was “No. 1, is this really true?”

Assuming it is true, Williams said, some people may worry whether there is a danger to the blood supply.

But Williamson said he would continue to give his high-risk patients the same recommendations he always has: practice “safe sex” and don’t donate blood or organs.

Times staff writer Lanie Jones contributed to this story.