Immunodeficiency Virus

NEW YORK -- This was a scene out of a movie, confused only because it was out of time and place. With cameras clicking and the media buzzing, there was Earvin Johnson gamely dribbling the basketball and swishing jumpers with that funny right-handed push and Pat Riley working him with hard passes that forced him to react."

WASHINGTON -- In a controversial move, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug yesterday to combat the AIDS virus -- the first in almost five years -- before having determined conclusively that it is safe and effective.Health officials and AIDS activists called the early approval of the anti-viral drug didanosine, or DDI, a landmark decision that signals what they called a new, more humane government response to the needs of desperately ill Americans."Today's action is a milestone," said Dr. David A. Kessler, head of the FDA. "It is the second major drug to be approved for AIDS.

By hunting and handling fresh primate meat, thousands of rural Africans might be infected with a virus in the same general category as HIV, according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study is the first to document virus transmission from primates to humans in a natural setting. "This is the first real-world evidence that these viruses cross species boundaries. And this appears to be something that is happening regularly," said the study's lead author, Nathan Wolfe, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Over a three-year period, Maryland has registered HIV-infection levels for childbearing women that are among the highest in the United States, says the state health department's AIDS Administration.Only three other states -- New York, New Jersey and Florida -- and the District of Columbia, have HIV-infection rates for childbearing women that exceed Maryland's.While the dramatic rise in rates seen between 1988 and 1989 was not repeated in 1990, the number of childbearing women infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)

Ferne E. Johnson, an AIDS activist and counselor, died Thursday of complications from acquired immune deficiency syndrome at Stella Maris Hospice in Towson. The Hamilton resident was 44.Ms. Johnson, a recovering drug addict, turned her personal struggle with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and AIDS into a mission of mercy and understanding for those similarly afflicted."She had been clean for the last nine years," said a son, Darrell T. Belton of Baltimore. "She made a great recovery from her drug addiction and was determined to help others."

The popcorn bowl was making the rounds and the air was filled with giggles as a question-and-answer party game hit full swing.Then someone blew up a condom like a balloon.But this was a party with serious overtones. The man and three women seated comfortably in this Towson apartment's small living room had gathered to participate in an HIV-AIDS outreach program run by Baltimore County's Office of Substance Abuse.Called Project Hope, the effort to deliver information about HIV -- thehuman immunodeficiency virus -- to black women began last year and by next month will have reached nearly 550 people.

Casting doubt on prospects for an AIDS cure, a leading researcher said yesterday that patients whose viral levels have been pushed to undetectable levels months after starting drug therapy actually harbor a silent infection in "resting cells" of their immune system.Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the existence of a "latent reservoir" of infection suggests that the virus might rebound to dangerous levels if patients ever stopped taking their medications.

In one of the first large studies to focus solely on women with the virus that causes AIDS, Johns Hopkins researchers have set out to learn why infected women get ill faster, receive less medical attention and die sooner than do their male counterparts.The five-year study, involving up to 1,600 women at four hospitals, was prompted partly by a growing concern that physicians are failing to recognize gynecological infections that may be early signs of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)

Acknowledging the complexity of getting drugs safely from airports to clinics, leaders in the global fight against AIDS said yesterday that medications should reach 1.5 million people by the end of the year - half the ambitious goal set two years ago. Officials with the World Health Organization and the United Nations program on AIDS said they didn't fully appreciate the challenges of delivering drugs to remote regions of Africa and Asia. "It's easy to get them to the airport, easy to get them to the ports," Dr. Jim Yong Kim, director of the WHO's HIV/AIDS department, said in a telephone news conference from Geneva.

A legislative proposal to establish a needle-exchange program in Baltimore to help prevent the spread of AIDS among intravenous drug users won some heavyweight support yesterday -- and some heavyweight opposition as well.Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. backed the plan to spend $50,000 in city funds for a three-year pilot program for up to 700 addicts that would be over- seen by the Baltimore Health Department.But Gov. William Donald Schaefer said yesterday that he opposed the idea, fearing it would encourage drug use.The proposed program, modeled after those in seven states, Washington, D.C., and eight foreign countries, would require an intravenous drug user to turn in a dirty hypodermic syringe in exchange for a clean one at a designated site.