Faculty Bibliography

AIDS deaths are on the decline in the United States, and the trend is expected to continue, federal health officials said Monday. The overall drop was attributed to greater access to medical care and to development of new drug therapies for the AIDS virus and for the myriad infections that can occur as fatal complications of AIDS, itself a potentially fatal disease. Worldwide, AIDS cases and AIDS deaths are on the increase. Experts have said that the combination drug therapies that have helped reduce deaths in the United States are unlikely to have a similar effect in the regions of Africa and Asia where the disease is growing. The cost and difficulty of administering the therapies are barriers to their effective use in poor countries

A woman apparently acquired the AIDS virus from deep kisses with an infected man, Federal health officials said yesterday. They said the case was the first reported transmission of H.I.V., the AIDS virus, through kissing. Both the man and woman had gum disease, factors that apparently facilitated transmission of H.I.V. Transmission most likely was through the man's blood, not saliva, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said in its weekly report. In emphasizing the rarity of such transmission, the Federal centers said the case was the only known one involving kissing among the 500,000 AIDS cases that have been reported to it since the epidemic was detected in 1981

WHEN men are infected with H.I.V. and another sexually transmitted disease, like gonorrhea, their semen contains about eight times as much AIDS virus as is found in semen of men who who do not have dual infections, a new study has found. The findings indicate that control measures used in some countries to battle AIDS are worthwhile and suggest that widespread detection and treatment programs for sexually transmitted diseases could help prevent many new H.I.V. infections, said the study's authors, from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill. The findings are relevant for the United States and other developed countries, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of a number of Federal agencies that paid for the study along with the World Health Organization. Family Health International conducted the study along with the University of North Carolina researchers

Lawrence K. Altman reviews the book 'Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century' by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles

Dr. [Richard Doll] said he believed that an important factor in the gap was that the male body was bigger and had more cells, providing a greater chance for something in a cell to go wrong. 'Lung cancer mortality in nonsmokers, for example, is about 20 percent higher in males than females, and one can easily account for that by the greater number of cells' in the airways, Dr. Doll said. The data analyzed by Dr. [Eileen Crimmins] are not nearly as bleak as is commonly believed. 'The difference in death rates makes women look less healthy in old age,' Dr. Crimmins said. 'The males have died off before they become disabled.' 'It is not that women have a greater tendency to get health problems,' Dr. Crimmins said, 'but that they live long enough' to fall into the most vulnerable period of life for disabling illness. And, she said, 'they live longer once they have them.'