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University Backpedals After Staph Labeled 'New HIV'

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By JESSE McKINLEY, The New York Times

Published: January 20, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO - In a matter of days, it jumped from a routine news release to a medical controversy.

Monday, a team of researchers led by doctors from the University of California at San Francisco announced that gay men were "many times more likely than others" to acquire a new strain of drug-resistant staphylococcus, a nasty, fast-spreading and potentially lethal bacteria known as MRSA USA300.

And sure enough, the study, published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was quickly picked up by reporters around the world and across the Internet, including a London tabloid which dubbed the disease "the new HIV."

The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which helped finance the study, affirmed Wednesday that the disease is not sexually transmitted or limited to a certain type of person. It is transmitted through skin-to-skin contact, the agency said in a statement, and is widespread in hospitals and among hospital workers.

But for gay men in San Francisco's Castro neighborhood, an early epicenter for the AIDS epidemic and a current hot spot for MRSA, the report seemed to cast an unfair, and all too familiar, stigma on their sexuality.

"The way they keep targeting gays as if gays alone are responsible for it, its like HIV/AIDS all over again," said Colin Thurlow, 60. "And we're sick and tired of it."

The report also inadvertently offered ammunition for anti-gay groups, including the conservative Concerned Women for America, which issued a statement Wednesday citing the "sexual deviancy" of gay men as leading to AIDS, syphilis and gonorrhea.

National gay rights groups were quick to label such talk as "hysteria," even as researchers at the university scrambled to clarify their findings. The school issued an apology Friday, saying the release had "contained some information that could be interpreted as misleading."

"We deplore negative targeting of specific populations in association with MRSA infections or other public health concerns," it concluded.

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