Coalition of Women’s Groups Push for Expanded Definition of AIDS

A coalition of activists assailed the Centers for Disease Control on Wednesday for not redefining AIDS to include symptomatic illnesses peculiar to women.

Aggressive cervical cancer, pelvic inflammatory disease and yeast infections kill women infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, even though they are never counted as true AIDS patients, critics said.

“How long will women continue to die, literally on the streets?” said Wendi Alexis Modeste of Syracuse, N.Y., who has the HIV virus. “I and my sisters will be a visible and vocal lesion in the side of the CDC until we are treated equally.”

The CDC, which called Wednesday’s meeting, has proposed a new definition for AIDS that would include 160,000 people infected with HIV but not seriously ill.

HIV patients now are told they have full-blown AIDS when they get one or more of the 23 indicator diseases included in the CDC definition, such as pneumonia and Kaposi’s sarcoma, a type of cancer.

The CDC has proposed revising that definition to include HIV-infected people whose level of the body’s master immune cells, called CD4 cells, dips to 200 per cubic millimeter, or a fifth the level of a healthy person.

But a coalition of women from the American Civil Liberties Union, the AIDS activist group ACT UP and other groups called on the CDC to include cervical cancer, pulmonary tuberculosis and recurrent bacterial pneumonia.

Such diseases infect HIV patients and kill them long before their CD4 level dips to 200 cells per cubic millimeter, they said. CD4 cells are the primary target of HIV.

The CDC has opposed adding cervical cancer, pulmonary TB and bacterial pneumonia to the definition because those diseases occur in otherwise healthy people fairly frequently.