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

DATE: FRIDAY, March 22, 1991                   TAG: 9103220927
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/2   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LONDON                                LENGTH: Medium

MAN WHO BEAT HOMOSEXUALS GOT AIDS THROUGH HAND CUTS

A man who beat up homosexual men is believed to have contracted the AIDS virus from his victims' infected blood that entered cuts on his hands, two researchers at the University of Nebraska say.

In a letter in the Saturday edition of the respected medical journal, The Lancet, the researchers said it was "a case of possible HIV infection via a previously undescribed route."

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is usually transmitted through intimate sexual contact, through the use of contaminated needles, through contaminated blood products or from mother to child.

The scientific name for the virus is human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.

The Nebraska researchers recounted the case of a 49-year-old AIDS patient who told doctors that when he was a truck driver in the New York-New Jersey area during the 1980s, he would look for places frequented by homosexual men and beat them up.

The patient said he would get large quantities of the victims' blood on himself and into cuts on his own hands during the attack, wrote Dr. Paul Carson and Dr. Jonathan C. Goldsmith, of the University of Nebraska's department of medicine.

They wrote that they had seen many small scabs on the patient's fingers allegedly suffered in a recent fight.

The patient did not seem to have had intercourse with anyone infected by the virus or to have used a contaminated intravenous needles or had a blood transfusion.

His wife of 25 years did not test positively for the virus, they wrote.

The doctors note that getting AIDS from attacking homosexuals is plausible, particularly in light of previous reports of AIDS transmission via cuts in the skin.

by CNB