A.I.D.S. also a threat for lesbians
NZPA-AP Washington Although A.LD.S. has shattered the homosexual male community, lesbians — with their normally low incidence of sexuallytransmitted diseases — have considered themselves beyond danger.
Now, however, some evidence points to the possibility of female-to-female transmission of the A.LD.S. virus, and some activists have begun advocating radical measures to avoid spreading the illness among gay women.
While lesbians are known to have contracted A.LD.S. virtually every documented case has involved intravenous drug
use or sex with gay or bisexual men, according to Gayle Lloyd, a spokeswoman for the United States Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta. The C.D.C. did not keep A.LD.S. statistics on women’s sexual preferences and therefore does not know how many lesbians have A.LD.S. or have died from its consequences, she said.
However, as of December 21, the C.D.C. had documented 3890 cases of A.LD.S. in women and girls in the United States, said Lloyd.
To date, there were no proven cases of woman-to-woman transmission of the A.LD.S. virus.
"I’m not saying that it’s an issue that C.D.C. has ignored. I’m saying that it has not surfaced, it’s not a transmission category,” said Lloyd.
But two letters from doctors and epidemiologists to medical journals about apparent woman-to-woman transmission from contact with infected blood are widely quoted in the gay press as evidence of a potential danger.
In one case, reported in the December, 1986, issue of “Annals of Internal Medicine,” a woman apparently caught the virus from her infected female lover after blood contact during' “traumatic sexual activities.”
The infected woman had been an habitual drug user and eventually died as a result of A.LD.S. The second woman developed A.1.D.5.-related complex, sometimes a precursor to full-blown A.LD.S. In the other case, reported in the July 4 issue of the “Lancet,” a dancer, aged 24, from the Philippines tested positive for the A.LD.S. virus after several years of travel in which she said she had sexual contact with women of many nationalities.
The dancer “denied all heterosexual contact and intravenous drug abuse, and she had no history of blood transfusion,” according to the letter to the
British medical journal. Neither letter purported to be proof of A.LD.S. transmission between women, although Dr Stanley Weiss, one of the writers of the first letter, believes lesbians should be concerned.
“I think the sum total of the reports would say that female-to-female transmission appears possible, but at this time is still a very uncommon or a rare occurrence,” he said. Some lesbian activists are advocating preventative measures ranging from using rubber surgical gloves to wearing dental dams — thin latex squares used in root-canal surgery to isolate teeth
from saliva and other fluids — as a kind of lesbian condom during oral sex. Others, however, regard such a reaction as alarmist. The chief victims of A.LD.S. have been homosexual men and intravenous drug abusers. Health officials estimate 1 million to 1.5 million Americans have been exposed to the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes A.LD.S. The disease is spread most often through sexual contact, needles or syringes shared by drug abusers, infected blood or blood products, and from infected pregnant women to their offspring.
A.I.D.S. also a threat for lesbians
Press, 5 January 1988, Page 14
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