Faculty Bibliography

More than 11 million children have been orphaned by AIDS since the epidemic was recognized in 1981, and the number is expected to rise to 13 million by the end of 2000, the United Nations said Wednesday in a report to mark World AIDS Day. The soaring number of AIDS deaths could eventually undermine the political stability of affected countries, said Dr. Peter Piot, head of the U.N. program on AIDS. All but 5 percent of the world's children orphaned by AIDS live in countries below the Sahara, UNAIDS and UNICEF said in the report. In the past, age-old networks of immediate and extended families would have assumed the care of orphans. But, the report said, 'the traditional African extended family is breaking down under the unprecedented burden of the pandemic.'

Is AIDS a disaster inadvertently brought on by early testing of a polio vaccine in Africa in the 1950s? In 'The River' (Little, Brown, $35), Edward Hooper suggests that an experimental oral polio vaccine might have been made with chimpanzee tissue contaminated with an ancestor of the virus that was to cause AIDS. Although he has no medical expertise, Hooper, 48, has done a prodigious amount of research since 1990. In 1,070 pages, including extensive footnotes, he builds a case based on circumstantial evidence that he accumulated in hundreds of interviews and exhaustive library research. He finds close coincidence in both time and place between the earliest cases of AIDS and the testing of an oral vaccine developed at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and, later, in two laboratories in Belgium. From 1957 to 1960, the vaccine was given to a million people in what are now Rwanda, Burundi and Congo

In ''The River'' (Little, Brown, $35), Edward Hooper suggests that an experimental oral polio vaccine might have been made with chimpanzee tissue contaminated with an ancestor of the virus that was to cause AIDS. Although he has no medical expertise, Mr. Hooper, 48, has done a prodigious amount of research since 1990. In 1,070 pages, with extensive footnotes, he builds a case based entirely on circumstantial evidence that he accumulated in hundreds of interviews and exhaustive library research. The similarities could be coincidence. ''The River'' does not prove his extraordinary theory, nor does it claim to. But it builds a sufficiently detailed case to require serious examination of his theory. Attempts to find answers require extensive research, and in the book and in subsequent interviews Mr. Hooper has offered a long list of suggestions, including laboratory testing of the small amounts of vaccine that still exist after having been stored for more than 40 years. Because the vaccine may have degraded over the decades, performing all the proposed research might still not determine whether it accidentally touched off the AIDS epidemic. And even if a simian virus turned up in the stored samples, it would not prove that it started the epidemic. The Wistar Institute, the first independent medical research center in the United States, appointed the 1992 panel to examine the theory that its vaccine might have touched off the AIDS epidemic. Now it says it is trying to find independent experts to do what they were unwilling to do seven years ago, when the panel recommended testing the remaining stocks of the experimental polio vaccine. One aim is to detect evidence of simian cousins of H.I.V.-1, the virus responsible for the overwhelming majority of AIDS cases in the world. A second is to determine the primate species from which the vaccine was prepared

AIDS has long been considered primarily a men's disease, but Tuesday the United Nations reported for the first time that more women than men were infected with the AIDS virus in Africa, the site of the vast majority of such infections in the world. In a report released in advance of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, the United Nations said that of the 22.3 million adults in sub-Sahara Africa infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, 12.2 million, or 55 percent, are women. This is the first time that data have been available to make such a comparison, officials said. U.N. officials said the precise reasons for the shift were unclear, though they noted that HIV was spread in Africa primarily through heterosexual intercourse. The virus passes more easily from men to women than from women to men. 'Ten years ago, it was hard to make people listen when we were saying AIDS wasn't just a man's disease,' said Dr. Peter Piot, head of U.N. AIDS, which joins a number of U.N. agencies, including the World Health Organization. Infection rates among women are much lower in the United States and other developed countries than in Africa. But more women, primarily in minority groups, are becoming infected through heterosexual sex in the United States, Piot said. The new evidence that Africa has six infected women for every five infected men comes from a number of studies in several African countries, Unaids said. Many AIDS experts have assumed that more women were infected than men in Africa

AIDS has long been considered primarily a men's disease. But yesterday the United Nations reported for the first time that more women than men were infected with the AIDS virus in Africa, the site of a vast majority of such infections in the world. In a report released in advance of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, the United Nations said that of the 22.3 million adults in sub-Sahara Africa with H.I.V., the AIDS virus, 12.2 million, or 55 percent, are women. The new evidence that Africa has six infected women for every five infected men comes from a number of studies in several African countries, Unaids said. Many AIDS experts have assumed that more women were infected than men in Africa. But documentation was not possible because much of the data was not broken down by sex, Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, an epidemiologist for the agency and a principal author of the report, said in an interview

AIDS has long been considered primarily a men's disease, but Tuesday the United Nations reported for the first time that more women than men were infected with the AIDS virus in Africa, the site of the vast majority of such infections in the world. In a report released in advance of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, the United Nations said that of the 22.3 million adults in sub-Sahara Africa infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, 12.2 million, or 55 percent, are women. The new evidence that Africa has six infected women for every five infected men comes from a number of studies in several African countries, U.N. AIDS said. Many AIDS experts have assumed that more women were infected than men in Africa. But documentation was not possible because much of the data was not broken down by sex, Dr. Bernhard Schwartlander, an epidemiologist for the agency and a principal author of the report, said in an interview

AIDS has long been considered primarily a men's disease, but Tuesday the United Nations reported for the first time that more women than men were infected with the AIDS virus in Africa, the site of the vast majority of such infections in the world

AIDS has long been considered primarily a men's disease, but Tuesday the United Nations reported that more women than men were infected with the AIDS virus in Africa, the site of the vast majority of such infections. In a report released in advance of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, the United Nations said that of the 22.3 million adults in sub-Sahara Africa infected with HIV, 12.2 million, or 55 percent, are women. U.N. officials said the reasons for the shift were unclear, though they noted that HIV was spread in Africa primarily through heterosexual intercourse. The virus passes more easily from men to women than from women to men

Now the Institute of Medicine, the medical arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has called for a new federal office to protect patients and said Congress should require all health care providers to report mistakes that cause serious injury or death. The main question is how the proposed system might work. While many health-related organizations and consumer groups welcomed the proposal, others expressed concern about additional government involvement in personal healthcare. Still others, including President Clinton, were concerned about patient confidentiality. Health maintenance organizations say they wonder how frank discussion of errors can occur as long as health care providers fear malpractice suits. In a report issued on Monday, the academy said there was a clear need to impose 'rigorous changes' throughout the fragmented health care system to reduce the estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths from medical errors each year in the United States

Is AIDS a disaster inadvertently brought on by humans in the early testing of a polio vaccine in Africa in the 1950s? This provocative theory seemed far-fetched when it first came to public attention in an article in Rolling Stone in 1992. Most AIDS experts dismissed it after a scientific committee reviewed the theory and deemed the probability very low. In 'The River,' Edward Hooper suggests that an experimental oral polio vaccine might have been made with chimpanzee tissue contaminated with an ancestor of the virus that was to cause AIDS