"... Harbatkin's fears are founded. In a health department study comparing 88 men with infectious syphilis to a control group, more than half of the infected men reported barebacking, or having anal sex without condoms. Drugs are also clearly implicated in the recent outbreak. One-third of men with syphilis reported using Viagra. And infected men were also more likely to use crystal meth, poppers, and pot.
The study also found that men with syphilis were more than twice as likely to have HIV. "It's a potentially explosive situation for the spread of HIV," says the health department's Blank. "People with HIV are leading longer and healthier lives than was possible in the '80s and early '90s. Part of that involves feeling good—and feeling good enough to have sex." And having active syphilis makes it easier to both pass on and contract HIV when you have sex. Being HIV-positive can also affect the course of syphilis, shortening the length of time it takes for the bacteria to move through their cycles and cause real damage...
Indeed, though, for now, the majority of new cases are in gay men, experts say others shouldn't consider themselves immune. "These things eventually follow the pattern of getting into the heterosexual population," says Kings County's Augenbraun. "If history teaches us anything, it's that, if we allocate resources for prompt treatment and testing of syphilis, we may be able to see a decline. On the other hand, if we don't, then I guarantee you this disease will move out of this relatively small group into a broad cross-section of New York City."
The terms AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) and ARC (AIDS-related complex) are historical artifacts, dating from the period between the recognition of an immunosuppression syndrome in gay men and the identification of HIV. In 1981 physicians in San Francisco and New York City began to see a pattern of unusual infections and cancers in young and otherwise healthy homosexual men. The first report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) focused on the men's infection with an atypical pneumonia and a cancer that had been previously seen only in elderly men of Mediterranean descent.[133]
Early research quickly pointed to common trends among cases, but these were obscured by many extraneous factors. The most suggestive of these was the use of drugs, such as inhalant stimulants, by some of the affected men. As these leads were being pursued, more cases of the syndrome were diagnosed. While epidemiologically inconsistent with the toxin hypothesis, they had the same distribution as hepatitis B. Many victims were positive for hepatitis B acquired in the bathhouses. The most crucial evidence for an infectious agent was the appearance of the disease in persons who had no visible link with the bathhouses.
While a toxic agent might have caused the disease among homosexuals and intravenous drug users, it did not explain the development of the disease among recipients of blood and blood products. Initially a mystery, these cases were soon traced back to the blood donors: homosexual men dead or dying of AIDS. The traditional test for an infectious agent was satisfied, and the parallel to hepatitis B was complete. When the antibody test for HIV became available, it was found in frozen blood samples that had been saved during the study of hepatitis B in the late 1970s.
There was some controversy over what to call this syndrome. Terms such as GRID (gay-related immunodeficiency disease) were considered but rejected in favor of the more neutral AIDS.134 The CDC promulgated a broad surveillance definition of what it called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome to facilitate the reporting and investigation of this new syndrome...
An excerpt from "4 . 3 HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS / AIDS"
III. AIDS IN AMERICA
The first reports of a new disease among gay men in Los Angeles appeared in 1981. Quickly, similar reports came from San Francisco and New York. Staid heterosexual researchers quickly learned of bath houses and those very active homosexuals with more than 200 different contacts a year. Since 1975, there had been an alarming increase of all sexual diseases among members of the gay community in California. Early on, an immunodeficiency was observed in this new category of gay-related diseases. Specifically, T-helper cells in the immune system seemed to disappear as the disease progressed.
The first name for the new disease was GRID: Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease. Early studies found it was greatest amongst persons with many partners in big cities who were anal receptive. By 1982, with the body count rising, physicians, researchers, and gay activists in France and the United States mobilized research programs...