One of the nation's leading experts on AIDS in children said this week reports of two rare cases in which a child and an adolescent transmitted the AIDS virus to others should be no cause for alarm.
"These cases don't change the fact that there has never been a reported instance in which children in day-care centers or schools passed the virus to others," said Dr. R.J. Simonds of the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.In a study appearing in The New England Journal of Medicine, doctors at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J., reported that a child infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, that causes AIDS, apparently infected another child in the same household.
Researchers said they did not know how the infection from one child to the other happened but said it seemed to be from an "unrecognized exposure to blood."
News reports about the incident appeared more than a week ago, along with stories that the CDC was to release information Thursday about a case in which a hemophiliac teenager with HIV infected his brother by sharing a razor.
Simonds co-authored an editorial in the medical journal that urged Americans not to become distracted by highly unusual cases of HIV transmission.
"We should keep focusing on the primary forms of HIV transmission, which is through unprotected sex, needle sharing and from mother to child," said Simonds, who heads the CDC's pediatric AIDS unit.
The study in the medical journal said it appeared that blood from one child's nose bleed or gum sore might have infected the other one.
The researchers said they were able to verify that the infection passed from one child to the other through genetic testing, which found that the HIV strain had been altered by the first child's treatment with the drug AZT.
The viral mutation caused by the drug was identical in both children, leaving no doubt that the second child was infected by the first one, the researchers reported.
Both children reportedly lived in a foster home. Simonds said it is important that parents, foster parents, child-care providers and others who deal with children take steps to limit a child's exposure to another child's blood.
"If a child gets a bloody nose, you clean the blood off. You use bleach to clean any blood that remains. It's common sense," he said.