To the Editor:
Last September, while conducting a preliminary sociomedical study on acquired immune deficiency syndrome in Rwanda, in the eastern part of central Africa, I was surprised to learn that 50 percent of the pig population had died in an African swine fever epidemic that had begun in December 1983. The epidemic spread northward from Burundi to south-central Rwanda near Butare.
This is the same area where Dr. Philippe van de Perre of St. Pierre's Hospital in Brussels and his associates found that 27 of 33 female prostitutes had AIDS or AIDS-related complex, what must certainly be the highest proportion of persons with such symptoms in any at-risk sample yet studied.
Eighteen percent of samples of adult blood donors and hospital employees in Kigali, the capital city, were seropositive to human immunodeficiency virus antibody last year. This year, the percentage has increased to 24. Human immunodeficiency virus, in Rwanda at least, appears to be the necessary but not sufficient condition to produce AIDS.
Perhaps the African swine fever epidemic and the high rate of illness among prostitutes near Butare is just a coincidence. But, with the recent African swine fever scare caused by the discovery of sickly pigs near Belle Glades, Fla., and with the report by Dr. John Beldekas of Boston University and his associates of some evidence of infection by the African swine fever virus in nearly half of a sample of 21 AIDS patients in the United States, epidemiologists and veterinarians might do well to explore the possibility that this virus is a co-factor in AIDS transmission in central Africa and perhaps other regions of the world. DOUGLAS A. FELDMAN New Haven, July 23, 1986 The writer, a medical anthropologist, is a research fellow at Yale University's Human Relations Area Files Inc.
