CHECKUP : NEWS, TIPS AND TRENDS HIV CASE, HUMAN BITE THOUGHT LINKED.

Scientists have reported the first case of HIV they believe was transmitted by a human bite.

Describing the case in the June 22 issue of the Lancet, the Eastern-European researchers reported that a 47-year-old-man who had HIV and advanced AIDS had a seizure at his neighbor's house.

The neighbor, a 53-year-old man, put his fingers into the infected man's mouth in an attempt to open his airway and help him breathe, said Dr. Ludvik Vidmar, an infectious disease specialist at the Clinical Center in the Republic of Slovenia.

The man with AIDS subsequently bit the neighbor on his hand, splitting one of his fingernails and leaving teeth imprints on his skin, although the bite wound did not bleed. The healthy man who had been bitten noticed that there was blood on the AIDS victim's lips caused when he bit his own tongue, Vidmar said.

Although the man initially tested negative for HIV, his doctors assumed he had the disease anyway and started him on a course of AZT treatment 10 hours after the incident. The reason: Standard blood tests for HIV often are not accurate until weeks or months after infection when the body mounts its antibody response against the virus.

The wounded man tested positive for HIV 54 days after being bitten. The man who had the seizure had died 41 days earlier, according to the Slovenian researchers.

``I'm not terribly surprised that cases like this are coming out,'' said Dr. Roger Pomerantz, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Human Retrovirology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pa.

Although two case reports have been previously reported in which people may have been infected with HIV through a bite wound, the people had reported other risk factors that made it difficult to determine whether they had definitely contracted the virus from the bite.

This case is different because the man had no other risk factors. For example, he had been married for 23 years and said he had no other sex partners and that his wife was HIV-negative, denied ever injecting drugs and had never had a blood transfusion, Vidmar said.

Home treatment: Because many yeast infection remedies are available without a prescription, a growing number of women are self-treating their vaginal infections.

But many women can't tell the difference between a yeast infection and more severe vaginal conditions, and may be using these over-the-counter products inappropriately, a new report has found.

In the study of 601 women age 16 or older, those with no prior history of yeast infections would have correctly diagnosed the condition only 11 percent of the time - often not recognizing that it is a more severe infection that requires prescription therapy, Georgia researchers reported.

``Based on our findings, women likely use OTC yeast-infection remedies to treat gynecologic conditions that are similar, but potentially more severe,'' said lead researcher Dr. Daron G. Ferris of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.