AIDS Virus With Artificial Insemination : Fertility: Wife infected in failed effort to cleanse hemophiliac mate’s sperm.

The wife of a hemophiliac with AIDS became infected with the deadly virus after undergoing artificial insemination in an effort to conceive a child, officials say.

The national Centers for Disease Control said fertility specialists had attempted to remove the virus from the husband’s sperm through separation and filtration, but the woman tested positive for the virus in January after inseminations last August, October and December. She did not get pregnant.

How the woman became infected with AIDS can never be proven, but the couple were using condoms during sex and did not engage in oral or anal sex, which are high AIDS-risk behaviors, the CDC said Thursday.

The husband, a hemophilia patient, had tested positive for AIDS infection since 1985; many hemophilia patients became infected in the first years of the AIDS epidemic through contaminated blood-clotting products.

“There are thousands of couples in this situation, and many of them are actively seeking some way of inseminating safely,” Dr. Scott Holmberg, the CDC’s chief of special AIDS studies, said.

“But there are clear CDC recommendations against doing this, and many physicians have continually counseled such couples not to run this risk,” he said.

The CDC said that AIDS is transmitted through blood and semen and that “there is no evidence that any procedure can reliably eliminate HIV from semen.”

The couple’s identity was not disclosed.

The CDC has received reports of at least two other couples who have tried artificial insemination despite one spouse’s infection. One attempt resulted in pregnancy, and the other did not; no infection has been detected yet in the non-infected spouse.

“The outcome of doing this very risky procedure is by no means assured,” Holmberg said.