AIDS TAKING GREATER TOLL ON WOMEN.

Byline: Jane E. Allen Associated Press

While AIDS deaths are declining among men, more women are dying, and their infections are often missed as the disease follows a course different from the path in men, according to new research presented Monday.

A University of Southern California team led by Dr. Alexandra Levine, director of USC's Norris Cancer Center, detected unusual types of breast cancer in young HIV-infected women. Those include rare metaplastic carcinoma, not even listed in a major national disease registry, she said.

Although breast cancer rates haven't yet increased in women with HIV, other AIDS-defining cancers are on the rise, such as melanoma, multiple myeloma and anal cancer, Levine said.

And with anti-viral AIDS drugs leaving the immune system of HIV-infected women ``not quite normal, we may be seeing ever-increasing epidemics of cancer,'' Levine predicted.

``AIDS-related cancers tend to be more aggressive than cancers in non-HIV-positive women,'' Dr. Janet Blair of the Los Angeles County health department told reporters at the third National Conference on Women and HIV.

Blair found that unlike men who survive about 23 months with Kaposi's sarcoma - the first malignancy recognized with AIDS - women survive just nine months with KS.

The difference ``may reflect delayed access to medical care'' or doctors' lack of recognition, she said.

Women's HIV often is missed because doctors aren't recognizing that vaginal infections, yeast infections of the mouth and throat and cervical cancer are part of the disease.

A Chicago consortium found illness-causing cytomegalovirus active in blood and secretions well before women with HIV progress to AIDS. The research found CMV was the root cause of vaginal infections in 41 percent of the women they tested.

The breast cancer and CMV results were among the first presented from the Women's Interagency HIV Study, known as WIHS, begun in 1992 and funded by the National Institutes of Health in Washington.

The four-day conference drew more than 1,500 scientists, infected women and health policy experts. More than 120 HIV-infected activists interrupted a news conference to demand a national plan to address the unique problems of women, including African-Americans and Latinos.

``What is the government doing for me? Where is the plan and the funding to save my life?'' asked Jeannine M. Scott, a mother of three from Philadelphia.

The women also bemoaned the state of women's access to cutting-edge treatments, which effectively makes it easier for them to get AZT to prevent transmission to their babies than to get drug treatment for themselves.