SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Condom Use Up, Sex Habits Same

College women are using condoms more frequently in response to AIDS but their sexual behavior otherwise is unchanged from that of their 1970s predecessors, a campus survey indicated last week.

Researchers in Rhode Island who queried 132 women students in 1989 found the same proportion had six or more lifetime sexual partners as had 486 women who were surveyed in 1975, before the epidemics of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The women of the pre- and post-AIDS eras showed no differences in their willingness to engage in oral or anal sex or to have multiple partners, said Dr. Stephen Zinner, a professor of medicine at Brown University who helped conduct the survey.

While he called the increase in condom use “encouraging,” he noted that the proportion of women polled in 1989 who had their partners use condoms still was only 41%.

“If less than 50% of the women in this educated college group use condoms, one would have to wonder what the proportion is in other groups,” said Zinner. The study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine.