Whitney Williams got the puzzling diagnosis from her mother: The 11-year-old girl had AIDS.
"She came into the doctor's room crying and asked me if I knew about AIDS," Whitney said. "I told her yes, we learned about it in school. I asked if I was going to heaven. She said, `Of course you are."'Whitney wants the answer to one question before she dies: "How did I get AIDS?" Medical experts are scrambling for an explanation.
The majority of the 290,000 documented AIDS cases in the United States can be classified by how they were transmitted - through blood, sex, needles or birth. But Whitney is among 90 American children who contracted the disease without falling into one of the risk categories.
Her parents, Bruce and Anita Williams, said they have heard many theories about how their daughter contracted the AIDS virus but still have no answer. She found out in March 1992 that she already had the full-blown disease.
"Whitney has never had a blood transfusion and never, to our knowledge, even been around anyone with AIDS," Mrs. Williams said.
The couple and their four other children have tested negative for the virus that causes AIDS.
"There have been ideas put forth by some doctors and attorneys ranging from contaminated instruments used in piercing Whitney's ears to an oral polio vaccine made with . . . monkey cells that were contaminated with HIV," Bruce Williams said.
Whitney was scheduled to travel Sunday to the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., to begin an experimental therapy with the drug rifabutin. Doctors hope the drug, approved by the Food and Drug Administration this year, will fight the onset of a blood infection associated with AIDS.
In recent months, Whitney had taken the drugs AZT and DDI, but neither has been effective, her parents say.
She has been hospitalized three times since being diagnosed with AIDS. Among other symptoms, she suffers pain, fatigue and night sweats and has painful sores in her mouth.