Doctor Links HIV Case to Beating of Gays

A man who says that he frequently beat up homosexual males over a period of six years may have contracted the AIDS virus from the blood of his victims, his physician says.

In a report published today in the British medical journal Lancet, a Nebraska doctor describes the case of a 49-year-old married man who claims to have had no possible exposure to the AIDS virus, or human immunodeficiency virus, except for a stint as a truck driver in New York during which he and his colleagues beat up homosexual males “too many times to count.”

The account, which drew skepticism from several AIDS experts, said the man drew substantial quantities of blood from his victims and suffered cuts on his own hands, which his doctor speculated allowed the virus to pass into the attacker’s bloodstream.

The man’s doctor, University of Nebraska AIDS specialist Paul Carson, said he hoped that the experience would deter the “dreadful practice of bashing people because they belong to a particular minority.”

But Carson stressed that his conclusion was only a possibility. Other experts said the chances of contracting HIV simply by contact with infected blood through a cut are remote.

David Henderson, an expert on the subject of HIV transmission at the National Institutes of Health, said that in only three cases out of 1,000 does a direct accidental “needle stick” with a syringe containing HIV-infected blood result in infection with the AIDS virus.

Other kinds of less direct exposures, such as blood on a open cut or scratch, “are likely to be associated with substantially less risk,” he said.

Some AIDS experts said it was more likely that the truck driver had engaged in riskier behaviors--such as unprotected sex or intravenous drug use--to which he was not admitting.

Few experts agreed with Carson that the truck driver’s condition would deter the increasingly common practice of “gay bashing.”

“My first thought was that maybe they will stop beating us up,” said Larry Kramer, the New York city playwright who founded the AIDS activist group ACT-UP. “But, then again, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll just start using guns.”

Carson said the case arose because the truck driver, who recently moved from the New York area, found out that he was HIV-positive during a routine blood test. The man had been married for 25 years and had three children. His wife did not test positive for HIV.

“He denied ever having sex with a man, nor with another woman since marriage, and claimed he had been impotent for about 10 years,” the article said. “He had used intravenous drugs once, three years previously, but distinctly remembered not sharing needles but using a needle from an unopened package.”