The possibility of a new superstrain of the virus that causes AIDS “should reinvigorate prevention efforts,” the leader of the largest homosexual-rights lobbying group in the United States said yesterday.
“We must redouble our prevention efforts … there must be both an individual component and a strong government component,” said Winnie Stachelberg, vice president of the Human Rights Campaign.
The former, she said, should be reflected in increased “personal responsibility” to reduce the risk of HIV infection through sexual promiscuity accompanied by drug use. Ms. Stachelberg said the government component should be education that addresses “both condom use and abstinence, not either-or.”
New York City health officials said Feb. 11 that they had detected what could be a rare, highly dangerous strain of HIV that was resistant to most drugs. This potential strain, which was diagnosed in a homosexual man, had advanced to AIDS in three months.
The infected man told health officials that he had engaged in sex with hundreds of men in recent weeks while taking crystal methamphetamine. Initially, health authorities said that the man could be plagued with a “supervirus” and that they were trying to track down his sex partners to determine whether they, too, were battling a more potent strain of HIV.
Noel Alicea, spokesman for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York, said there is not enough information available to say whether this superstrain exists, but that his organization continues to “provide outreach” at homosexual bars and bath houses.
“We tell them to take measures to protect themselves, and we hand out condoms,” he said.
Some scientists denounced New York Department of Health officials for making the quick assertion because they said it was not clear whether the man had contracted a worse strain of HIV or whether his immune system had been weakened by drug use or genetics.
Two New York doctors, David D. Ho and Martin Markowitz, are to discuss the case today at a session of the 12th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston. About 4,000 of the world’s AIDS specialists are meeting there.
“Regardless of whether this virus is a superstrain … more prevention is what we need,” Ms. Stachelberg said.
In a new statement on its Web site, GMHC said: “The rise in new [HIV] infections in New York City among gay men and, in particular, gay men of color, has been a serious and paramount concern throughout our work.”
But “HIV prevention efforts in the U.S. are seriously underfunded and increasingly censored” in that they are “increasingly based on scientifically discredited abstinence-only approaches.”
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