AIDS Is No. 1 Killer of Young Americans : Epidemic: Centers for Disease Control director warns rate of infection is growing in heterosexual community.

Declaring AIDS to be the leading cause of death among Americans between the ages of 25 and 44, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that the disease has moved dramatically into the heterosexual community and that the transmission rate there is growing.

“In the history of epidemics, AIDS is among the worst in the world,” CDC Director David Satcher told a gathering of Atlanta business and labor leaders.

He said knowledge of the extent of HIV infection is “imperfect and incomplete,” but he added that “every day we’re learning something new about the virus and moving closer to a cure.”

In the United States, 400,000 people have contracted AIDS since 1981, and 250,000 people have died from it. Increasingly the victims are intravenous drug users and their sexual partners.

“In December, 1984, three-fourths of AIDS cases were men who have sex with men,” Satcher said. “This year, this group makes up only a little more than half of all cases, so you see the epidemic is changing.”

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome is the leading cause of death among men in the 25-44 age group and the fourth leading cause in women in that same group--behind cancer, accidental injuries and heart disease, according to preliminary 1993 data compiled by the CDC.

Among young African American women, who make up 82% of American women with AIDS, it is the leading cause of death.

From 1985 to 1993, the proportion of people with the AIDS virus acquired through heterosexual transmission increased from 2% to 7%.

Satcher was one of the speakers Thursday at the World AIDS Day conference in Atlanta held to promote adoption of AIDS awareness and education programs in the workplace.

The CDC has helped companies establish education programs and AIDS policies for the last two years--making the case, as one speaker said Thursday, that for most employers the cost of implementing a comprehensive education program would be less than the medical cost of treating a single person infected with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus.

William H. Baumhauer, chairman and chief executive of DAKA International, a food service management company that also owns the Fuddruckers hamburger chain, gave several examples to illustrate why such programs are necessary.

In 1987, a college where the firm operated a food service operation insisted that DAKA fire or remove from campus a gay general manager suspected of having AIDS. The next year, employees at one restaurant refused to work with a co-worker married to an HIV-infected man.

And three years ago, a college student who believed that DAKA was hiring people with AIDS because she had read the firm had implemented an AIDS education program expressed fear that she’d contracted the disease after eating a salad that had blood on it. Baumhauer said the red substance was beet juice.

“Since no vaccine is available, education remains one of our few tools to fight this epidemic,” Baumhauer said.

One participant in the conference was Jerald A. Breitman, the director of professional relations at the pharmaceutical firm Burroughs Wellcome Co. who is infected with HIV.

He stressed the importance of companies developing a policy for educating employees and for handling workers who have contracted HIV, because the fear of unemployment along with rejection from family and friends prevents many people from acknowledging their illness and seeking treatment.