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

DATE: MONDAY, February 21, 1994                   TAG: 9402210124
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

STUDY: AZT SLOWS AIDS TRANSMISSION TO BABIES

The findings were considered so significant that the study, which began in April 1991, was ordered stopped on Friday, and officials are spending the holiday weekend notifying the 59 medical centers in the United States and France participating in the study to offer AZT to the pregnant women who had been receiving a placebo.

In addition, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the data from the study were being distributed as a "clinic alert" through the National Library of Medicine.

Dr. Harold Jaffe, an epidemiologist and the top scientist on HIV at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said Sunday that the finding was one "of major public health importance."

"It is the first indication that mother-to-child transmission of HIV can be at least decreased, if not prevented," he said, "and it will provide a real impetus for identifying more HIV-infected women during pregnancies so that they could consider the benefit of AZT treatment to themselves and their children," he said.

About 4 million women give birth in the United States each year, and the disease centers estimate that 6,000 to 7,000 of the women are HIV-infected. About 1,500 to 2,000 of their babies later become HIV-infected.

The transmission of the virus to newborns is a much bigger public health problem in developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America, where infection rates among childbearing women can reach 10 to 30 percent,