HIV's new super scare: media reports about a powerful new "super strain" of HIV may be a much-needed wakeup call for gay men.

Recent news of a new HIV "super strain" that quickly develops into AIDS brought back an unsettling old fear for 37-year-old West Hollywood, Calif., landscape designer Adam Schiff. Having come out at 13, he bore witness to the ghastly opening chapters of the AIDS epidemic. "But this thing scares me more," he says. "The frost time around, they just didn't know much, so everything came out slowly. This is something that they're really slamming us with. This is something that is out there now."

The new strain surfaced in February after an unidentified 46-year-old New York City man, having tested positive for HIV type 1 in December 2004, became AIDS-symptomatic by January. Media accounts of a virulent new "super" virus spread like wildfire, and many AIDS activists and health professionals were quick to say, yes, sexually active people, especially gay men, should be scared.

What is known, as initially reported by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in mid February, is that a highly unusual and especially deadly strain of HIV has appeared, one with serious resistance to most known anti-HIV medications. The "patient zero" behind the announcement in New York has suggested that his initial HIV infection occurred in late October 2004, possibly during a crystal meth-fueled party involving unsafe sex with numerous partners. If that's true, health officials are faced with an astoundingly short infection-to-AIDS time frame of just under three months. Equally troubling to the man's doctors has been his resistance to a large number of commonly used antiretroviral drugs, which has rendered him difficult to treat.

Further fanning the flames of public fear was the report that the New York man may have had sex with as many as 10 additional men after that October party. One of those could have been a California resident who health officials there say tested positive for a similar HIV "super strain" in February. But they have been unable to locate the man, and experts have not been able to establish a definitive connection.

So are we facing a major new health crisis? "At this point it is just too soon to know," says Ana Oliveira, executive director of New York-based Gay Men's Health Crisis. "While we await additional information from researchers and scientists, the truth is we are still in limbo."

Some questioned the prudence of alerting the public to such a potentially explosive yet vaguely defined health risk. "These kinds of cases have been reported before," Martin Delaney, founder of San Francisco's Project Inform, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "A lot of clinicians see this stuff, and they don't call press conferences." But New York's health department is standing by its action. "The identification of a highly resistant and apparently rapidly progressive strain of HIV in New York was a sentinel event that required physician and public warning," says a statement issued by the department in late February. "Our investigation continues. Although we do not yet know whether the strain is more widespread or if it will have similar characteristics in other people, the fact remains that AIDS is a deadly disease."

Medical experts generally lauded the health department's early public disclosure, echoing its stance that sharing tentative information is far preferable to remaining silent in the face of looming disaster. "It's the responsibility of public-health officials to alert people to real danger, even if it's not yet completely understood," says Michael Weinstein, president of AIDS Healthcare Foundation in Los Angeles. "SARS was a perfect example, where we saw that those countries that really jumped on it had much greater success in fighting it than ones like China who tried to hide it."

Weinstein and other AIDS professionals have said that should the new strain prove to be a false alarm, it still serves as a harsh and long overdue wake-up call to the reckless realities behind the resurgence in new HIV infections among gay men. "The strain itself is just like the canary in the coal mine," Weinstein says. "Whether or not this will go from being a cluster of cases to thousands of cases, it's very hard to say. What's important is that it's indicative of a subculture of self-destruction and carelessness about our health. HIV is still deadly. That hasn't changed, despite the fact that we have medications."

As research on the potential new strain continues, there's little comfort for sexually active gay men like Schiff. He's practicing safer sex and trying to remain as calm as possible, but he fears a return to what he saw when he was younger--a wave of deaths from a new and untreatable epidemic.

"I'm freaked out," he says. "I keep thinking, How could this be happening to us again?"