BOOK REVIEW : A Cry for Help for Women With AIDS : THE INVISIBLE EPIDEMIC: The Story of Women and AIDS, <i> by Gena Corea</i> ; Harper Collins; $23; 356 pages

Women and children will suffer 60% of HIV infections in the United States by the year 2000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control. Many of those women, says author Gena Corea in this blazing feminist attack on the U.S. medical Establishment, will be married, monogamous, non-drug-using, middle-class Caucasians--in other words, precisely the women who think of AIDS as something that happens to other people.

The statistics are surprising: Women are 10 times as likely as men to become infected with HIV through ordinary heterosexual sex, and women die twice or three times as fast from the disease as men do.

Meanwhile, a cure for AIDS, or a vaccine against the disease, is proving devilishly hard to discover. The reason is that the HIV virus, like the viruses that cause flu and the common cold, keeps changing as it passes from person to person, making it an elusive target for a magic bullet.

Scientists at least have developed a fairly comprehensive understanding of the disease’s symptoms, but Corea points out that this understanding is based almost solely on research with men: Women with AIDS, she claims, have been all but ignored, and as a result they are suffering, both physically and economically, much more than their share.

The male-dominated medical profession, Corea writes, has focused on women solely as AIDS “vectors” or carriers of the AIDS-causing HIV virus. Corea says doctors tend to view women who test positive for HIV not as human beings suffering from an invariably fatal disease but as threats to their unborn children or to the men with whom they have sex. Accordingly, says Corea, treatment for HIV-positive women tends to ignore the women’s own condition and focus instead on preventing her from spreading the virus.

Corea claims that doctors have deliberately refused to study how AIDS affects women internally. A consequence of this willful ignorance, she says, is that a woman’s AIDS symptoms typically go unrecognized until the woman reaches an advanced stage of the disease, one reason for the short life expectancy of women with AIDS.

Often, Corea says, the symptoms of AIDS in women are never recognized at all. Instead, the deaths of young females infected with HIV are attributed to pneumonia, cervical cancer or other illnesses that the women, their resistance weakened by AIDS, could not fight off. The evidence seems conclusive, she says, that AIDS has spread far more widely among American women of all classes than doctors are willing to admit.

In “The Invisible Epidemic,” Corea sets out to document the last decade of U.S. doctors’ shabby treatment of women with AIDS.

An investigative reporter with two favorably reviewed books to her credit (“The Hidden Malpractice” and “The Mother Machine”), she tells a headlong, emotion-charged story, shifting her focus from national panoramas of AIDS-related female morbidity and mortality to heart-wrenching close-ups of individual women and children with AIDS, then to group portraits of women at conferences and demonstrations, where women deliver spellbinding orations, shout down male speakers and spontaneously form friendships across racial, social and economic lines.

Male readers may sense in Corea a certain gender-based hostility--e.g., “Male supremacy provides the wings on which the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) flies around the world.” And scientists may bristle at seeing their shining citadel mocked as “the Funhouse of Scientific Knowledge.”

But Corea shines an incandescent light onto a dark and apparently dangerously neglected area of American medicine. “The Invisible Epidemic” cries out for a considered answer from American doctors.