So many of America's young - one of every 92 young men and one of every 33 young black men - are believed to have the AIDS virus that it threatens to become a deadly "rite of passage" in this country, a scientist says.

The sobering statistics illuminate the government's warnings that AIDS is becoming more of a threat to the nation's youths, even as it tapers off among older people."That's a very disturbing future," said Philip Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute, who reports on the estimated rate of HIV infection among men in their late 20s and 30s today in the journal Science.

In January, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that AIDS was the No. 1 killer of people ages 25 to 44 in 1993. The virus that causes AIDS can lurk symptomless for 10 years, meaning some of these people likely were infected as teenagers.

But the CDC statistics gave no indication how many people in 1993 were living with - and spreading - the disease because unbeknownst to them they were carrying the virus. Rosenberg's study attempts to address that gap.

Rosenberg used the AIDS cases and fatalities gathered by the CDC. He then used a process called "back-cal-culation" as well as other data, including statistics on AIDS mortality, population data and what is known about the disease's incubation period to estimate the number of likely HIV infections as of Jan. 1, 1993.

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"It is important to recognize that backcalculated estimates are based on modeling rather than direct data and are very uncertain," he acknowledged in explaining his findings. Nevertheless, his analysis is believed to be the most precise look at HIV prevalence to date.

The CDC has counted 501,310 AIDS cases since 1981 and 311,381 deaths.

People between the ages of 18 and 25 experienced a rapid rise in HIV infections between 1986 and 1992, during the same time when older Americans' risk of HIV infection leveled off, Rosenberg found.

By 1993, people between the ages of 27 and 39 were most likely to be infected with HIV, he concluded. His study said between 630,000 and 897,000 Americans likely carried the virus at the beginning of 1993.

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