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

DATE: THURSDAY, July 29, 1993                   TAG: 9307290092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

YOUNG WOMEN MOST AFFECTED IN SPREAD OF AIDS

As women grow older, they become less likely to contract the virus even though, on average, their number of sex partners increases. Men, by contrast, do not encounter their peak risk for AIDS infection until they are in their late 20s and early 30s.

Those findings, described in a report released Wednesday by the United Nations Development Program, can be traced to a variety of causes from social and behavioral factors to anatomy.

According to the study, women between the ages of 15 and 25 make up about 70 percent of the 3,000 women a day who become infected with the AIDS virus and of the 500 women a day who die of AIDS.

In most of the Third World, where AIDS is overwhelmingly a heterosexually transmitted disease, the report said, there are as many female cases as male and sometimes more.

In the United States, women accounted for just 14 percent of AIDS cases last year, but the proportion is growing rapidly. Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that American women of all ages were coming down with AIDS four times as fast as men. In 1992, CDC said, the number of women with AIDS climbed 9.8 percent while the number of men with AIDS grew 2.5 percent.

Also in 1992, heterosexual transmission of HIV, the AIDS virus, became the leading cause of the disease in women, overtaking the sharing of needles used for intravenous drugs.

A recent study of youths serving in the Job Corps showed that 4.2 women per 100,000 were infected with HIV as compared to 2.4 per 100,000 for men.

"HIV is into the teen-age population and it's spreading quickly and silently," said Karen Hein, a specialist in adolescent medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and director of the adolescent AIDS program at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. She said that half of the teen-age girls at her clinic who are HIV-positive have had fewer than five sex partners.

The special vulnerability of women was first noted in Africa some years ago, but it was not considered relevant to industrialized countries.

In those early days of the pandemic, many experts considered African AIDS a different phenomenon from American or European AIDS, which then was overwhelmingly a disease of gay men and intravenous-drug users. The conventional explanation was that Africans had high rates of other sexually transmitted diseases that predisposed them to HIV, especially by causing open sores on the genitals.

She said American girls are now having sex at younger ages than before, with the median age at first intercourse at 15 to 16. And young people have high rates of other sexually transmitted diseases. In addition, the U.N. study found, there are factors that put young women at much greater risk than young men.

One is anatomy. The tissue that lines the vagina, and which can be injured during sexual intercourse, is very thin in preadolescent girls. It begins to thicken as puberty progresses and reaches its maximum about two years after the first menstrual period.

Memo: ***CORRECTION***