AIDS Shortening Women’s Lives : Public health: New Jersey statistics bode ill for the nation. The disease is rapidly becoming a leading killer of young, black females.

She does not look to the future beyond death benefits and a living will, even though she is only in her 30s. The fun of life eludes her. Death hovers over her. Along with hundreds of other young black women in New Jersey, she has AIDS.

“You basically don’t know how long you’re going to be here, so you don’t make too many plans,” said the woman, who asked to be identified by her first initial, “S.”

Even worse is the lot of Christina, another black woman in her 30s who would identify herself only by her first name. Her 2-year-old son was born with AIDS after her boyfriend, who used intravenous drugs, infected her through sexual relations.

In New Jersey, AIDS now kills more black women between ages 15 and 44 than accidents or any other disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

New Jersey has the highest proportion of female AIDS patients--about 21%, which is more than double the nationwide figure, according to Dr. Patricia Kloser, medical director of AIDS services at University Hospital in Newark.

The epidemic is straining community services too.

Newark hospitals have expanded clinic and outpatient services. Five hospitals have formed a consortium and asked the state for permission to open a 60-bed home for AIDS patients who do not require hospital care.

“Our objective was to avoid a crisis by coming up with an alternative system of care,” said Marc Lory, chief executive officer of University Hospital and the consortium’s chairman.

But for some, the situation seems already to have reached crisis proportions.

“Oh, God!” Kloser said with a laugh when asked if the clinic she started at University Hospital a little more than two years ago is overcrowded. “That’s a bit of an understatement. There’s a long waiting list for people trying to get seen in the clinic.”

Through the years, she estimated, she has seen more than 1,000 women infected with the disease.

According to the latest CDC data, the death rate among black women in New Jersey 15 to 44 years old was 47.3 per 100,000 in 1988, up from 41 per 100,000 in 1987. Researchers said that 136 black women in that age bracket died of AIDS in New Jersey in 1988. AIDs also killed 56 white women, among whom it was the fourth leading cause of death.

“The rate is comparable to the rates reported on the Ivory Coast among women of reproductive age, which was 31 per 100,000” in 1987, said Susan Y. Chu, a CDC epidemiologist.

Even more startling is the prediction that this year, AIDS probably will be the fifth leading cause of death among all women of childbearing age in the United States.

The CDC said that more than 150,000 cases of AIDS have been diagnosed in adults and children since the epidemic began. More than 95,000 of those patients have died.

Sister Gabriel Triolo, an AIDS case manager at St. Michael’s, is alarmed by what she sees.

“One is the woman that maybe has been receiving some kind of public assistance for years and finds out she’s (infected) and then has to negotiate through the system not only being poor, but being poor and sick,” she said.

“I also can think of the case of a woman who, at one time, was making $30,000 a year, a single parent with a 10-year-old son. Now, unable to work, she is trying to exist on $322 a month. I see both situations as very desperate for women, especially women with children.”

Dr. Anthony C. Botti, director of hematology at the United Hospitals Medical Center in Newark, said that many poor people with AIDS go to a hospital only when death is imminent because have no means of transportation. Others simply stop coming for treatment, usually when they get too sick.

“That’s part of the problem,” said Botti.

Most of the female patients he sees range in age from 25 to 45.

“This is an age group that traditionally were the healthiest of our population,” he said. “They are the ones it’s devastating. . . . I think black women get hit on several fronts. They may be IV-drug-abusing people, but they’re also sex partners of either bisexual men or drug-abusing men. It’s easier to get it from a man than a woman.”

New Jersey has been hit hard by the epidemic because it has many male IV drug users who transmit the disease to unsuspecting female partners, Botti said.

A 1989 state report on AIDS also identified other reasons. “Poor access to health care, poverty, inadequate housing and insufficient and inadequate treatment for substance abuse have emerged as common themes that contribute to the severity of the epidemic and add to the difficulty of responding to it,” the report said.

What University Hospital’s Kloser finds frightening is that at the beginning of the epidemic, about 80% of the women she treated took drugs intravenously.

Now it’s about 50-50, said Kloser, which she believes means that more women get the disease through having sex with an intravenous drug user, a past IV user or a bisexual man.

That was the sad fate of “S” and Christina.

AIDS wreaks havoc in the workplace, among family and friends, and even in the bedroom, as “S” and Christina found out with much pain.

“Sex doesn’t play a very important role in our lives because of the virus,” said “S,” referring to herself and her boyfriend.

At work as a public school teacher, she said she was treated poorly by her supervisors.

“I’m almost positive some of the news leaked out and there was a need for me to no longer work with that school system. I feel I was blacklisted. I couldn’t even get a job as a substitute teacher,” she said.

She left teaching three years ago and lived off her state unemployment benefits. When they ran out, she went on welfare. Now she does clerical work for a temporary agency.

When Christina first found out she had AIDS, she felt guilty and feared that she would be ostracized by family and friends.

“But I don’t anymore, because I didn’t ask for this disease,” she said. “It’s just like cancer. No one asks for cancer.”

She told only her immediate family and close friends. They have not shunned her.

The only guilt she feels now is toward her son.

“I brought this upon him even not knowing,” she said. “When I look upon my son . . . if I had known I was infected, I would have never brought a child into the world.”