AIDS GROWS AMONG MINORITY WOMEN

There is no cure for AIDS, experts keep repeating. What's more, the
demographic profile of those afflicted keeps shifting, as if the
disease were taking advantage of public exhaustion with the subject in
order to pounce on new groups.

Over the past several years there has been a sharp increase in the
number of AIDS cases affecting black and Latino women. According to
the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and the Chicago Department of Health,
during the last decade the yearly number of new female AIDS cases in
Chicago, almost all of them African-American or Hispanic, has nearly
quadrupled, from 54 out of 768 cases (7 percent) to 264 out of 1,200
cases (22 percent).

The AIDS Foundation has asked the City Council to fund a
public-awareness campaign directed at minority women of childbearing
age and public hearings are scheduled for Tuesday. The proposal
deserves to be approved and implemented promptly.

About 5,800 people in the six-county metropolitan area have AIDS, 870
of them women. These numbers, however, understate the problem. Thanks
to new drugs, there is a growing disparity between numbers of
HIV-infected people and those with AIDS.

Because Illinois does not track HIV infections but only AIDS cases,
the number of people carrying HIV can only be estimated. Still,
national models and data indicate that, in addition to the actual AIDS
cases, about 20,000 other Chicago-area individuals--4,300 of them
women--are infected with HIV.

It's also worth noting that while deaths from AIDS have declined
dramatically in the city--from 968 in 1995 to 377 in 1997--the annual
rate of new HIV infections nationwide (40,000) and locally (1,500)
remains virtually unchanged.

Intravenous drug use is the principal cause of the growing incidence
of AIDS among women, followed only by sexual relations with
HIV-infected drug addicts. To compound the problem, some pregnant
women in turn pass the virus on to their fetuses.

Admittedly, this is a population not easily reached with public
awareness messages, but that does not make this a merely symbolic gesture.

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic some 15 years ago, gay males
were most likely to be infected, but that has changed thanks to
relentless "safe sex" warnings. Between 1988 and 1996, the percentage
of AIDS cases in Chicago transmitted through homosexual sex dropped
from 71 to 44 percent, while cases due to intravenous drug use rose
from 16 to 36 percent.

In addition to prevention, greater awareness of the problem among
minority female populations could lead to more voluntary testing,
earlier medical intervention to forestall the onset of the disease and
a reduction in fetal infections.

Even if it prevents only relatively few new infections--or their
progression into full-blown AIDS--a well-crafted and targeted
awareness campaign could pay for itself easily and quickly, saving
both medical costs and human suffering.