Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, August 27, 1993                   TAG: 9308270173
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B3   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LYNCHBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

STATE HEALTH OFFICIALS REPORT AIDS' SHIFT TO WOMEN

"It's a very scary shift," Del. Joan Munford, D-Blacksburg, chairwoman of a joint legislative committee studying AIDS, said during a public forum and hearing.

Sen. Yvonne Miller, D-Norfolk, said the AIDS epidemic in Virginia was at first dismissed by many as a disease affecting "gays seen as unworthy" and more recently "minorities seen as dispensable."

"Now," she said in an increasingly louder voice, "we have a scourge more deadly to women at an earlier age, and that impacts families. We are talking about a disease damaging our culture in a different way. We are really entering a new era."

According to the Virginia Department of Health, the number of AIDS cases reported in the state is up about 12 percent so far this year, compared with an 11 percent increase in 1992.

An estimated 4,665 people in Virginia have contracted AIDS, including 106 children, and nearly 2,900 of them have died.

In general, the report shows an increasing shift in the magnitude of the disease from Northern Virginia to central and eastern Virginia and from white to black patients. The percentage of AIDS transmissions linked to injecting drugs has been steadily increasing, and the ages of the patients are steadily decreasing.

But a closer look at the statistics reveals the "changing face of AIDS" in Virginia, said Casey Riley, director of the Health Department's sexually transmitted disease bureau.

Of Virginians with AIDS, 12 percent are female; but 23 percent of Virginians with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS are female.

"The increase in women with HIV seen over the last few years can, to a large extent, be attributed to sexual transmission of HIV from drug users," Dr. Grayson B. Miller, chairman of the Health Department's epidemiology office, told the committee.

The rate of HIV infection among childbearing women in Virginia jumped to 1.5 per thousand in the October 1991-September 1992 survey period from 1.1 per thousand the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

More than half of the AIDS cases reported among women have been reported in this decade, Casey said. Statistics show one in three children of infected mothers will be infected with an AIDS-causing virus.

But a more dramatic and timely snapshot of AIDS in Virginia came from one of the committee's members, Dr. Lisa Kaplowitz, director of the AIDS Program at Medical College of Virginia:

More than half of the new HIV patients so far this year have been women, she said.

"Somehow, we haven't totally grasped the implication of this," she said. "The epidemic in children is climbing at a rapid rate, and there is a pending disaster with the number of orphans when the mothers who have no partners die or are incapacitated."

Miller said there was a large drop in sexually transmitted diseases other than AIDS last year, which he said suggests "many people are heeding our disease prevention messages and taking precautions to protect themselves."

Homosexual men made up 12 percent of the syphilis cases in 1991, compared with 50 percent in the early 1980s.

But Miller and others who spoke to the Joint Subcommittee Studying AIDS said many teenagers remain unconvinced they can get AIDS by having sex, and intravenous drug users either are not getting information on or ignoring the AIDS risk.

"Young people often consider themselves immortal," he said. "We must convince them otherwise."