AIDS DEATHS PLUNGE IN NYC : 30% DROP IN '96 HAILED AS UNUSUALLY `GREAT NEWS' FOR EPIDEMIC.

Byline: Daily News Staff and Wire Services

For the first time since the AIDS epidemic was recognized in 1981, deaths from the disease in New York City dropped sharply last year, a city Health Department official said Friday.

Speaking at a scientific meeting here, Dr. Mary Ann Chiasson, assistant commissioner for disease intervention research, said that the number of people who died from the disease fell by 30 percent to 4,944 in 1996 from 7,046 in 1995, and that the decline occurred in all ethnic groups and in both sexes. For unknown reasons, the drop was greater among men than women.

Chiasson said that she could not give a conclusive reason for the decline, but that the most likely explanations were advances in therapy introduced in the early 1990s and expanded access to medical care and services made possible by a surge in government money in 1994.

``It's great news, and we haven't had a lot of that in the AIDS epidemic,'' Dr. Harold W. Jaffe, an AIDS expert at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said at a news conference on the New York City report.

Dr. Lars O. Kallings of Stockholm, a leader in international AIDS research, said ``the data were very impressive and will have global importance because widespread publicity has focused attention on New York City's epidemic.'' He said that because so many of New York's AIDS cases are among the poor, the new statistics would offer hope to poor nations with intractable AIDS problems.

But it was unclear whether the decline in New York City is occurring elsewhere in the nation, since full statistics have not yet been compiled for 1996.

In Los Angeles County, a ``slight decrease'' in reported deaths brought on by AIDS has been detected, said Dr. Paul Simon, deputy director of HIV epidemiology for the county.

In 1995, 3,198 deaths from AIDS were reported in Los Angeles County. That number dropped to 2,871 in 1996, a decrease of 11.3 percent. Those figures include the city of Los Angeles, where 1,248 people died from AIDS last year, compared to 1,580 in 1995.

While Simon cautioned that the AIDS death rate needs ``more observation'' to determine whether a concrete downward trend has been established, ``the numbers suggest that the wider array of treatments available for HIV patients is having an impact.''

Officials at the San Francisco Health Department said AIDS deaths reported in 1996 rose to 1,517 from 1,443 the previous year.

Chiasson said she thought that a major factor in the decline of AIDS cases in New York was widespread use of the growing number of drugs introduced since the early 1990s to combat HIV, the AIDS virus, and the many so-called opportunistic infections that occur as complications of AIDS. Such therapies are helping AIDS patients live longer, Chiasson said, with the median survival time following diagnosis having increased to 19 months.