RESURGENT DISEASES PUZZLE RESEARCHERS

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

DATE: SUNDAY, January 19, 1992                   TAG: 9201190010
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
RESURGENT DISEASES PUZZLE RESEARCHERS
Tuberculosis. Measles. Syphilis. All of these diseases were once thought to be under control, if not eradicated. Now some of them have reached epidemic proportions in the United States, and others are gaining.
Across the country, epidemiologists, the detectives of disease, are trying to figure out why these diseases are returning.
"The ideal would be to find a single cause of things," said Dr. Thomas Frieden, a New York-based epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control. "But it's not as simple as that."
The resurgence of tuberculosis, for instance, which is at its highest level in 23 years, is largely a result of AIDS, researchers say. The weakened immune systems of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, increase their susceptibility to TB. Some studies show that 50 percent of TB patients are also HIV positive.
The increasing rate of syphilis can be linked to drug abuse. And while the number of cases of gonorrhea is decreasing, epidemiologists speculate that these contradictory trends can be explained by crack. The use of that form of cocaine, Frieden said, tends to "increase the number of sexual partners" a person has, bettering the odds for sexually transmitted disease.
There is less gonorrhea, he said, because it is more easily identified and is treatable with a single injection, unlike syphilis.
And measles owes much of its resurgence to complacency rather than drug abuse or living conditions. Part of that increase appears to be the failure of many parents, particularly those in poorer communities, to vaccinate their children during the first five years.
But much of today's measles epidemic has roots in the 1960s and early 1970s, when a largely ineffective vaccine was used. As a result, many young adults are no longer immune, a factor in recent outbreaks of measles at colleges.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB