The Nation - News from Nov. 20, 1987

Up to one in 50 pregnant women in America’s inner cities may be infected with the AIDS virus, a rate as high as that in parts of Africa, where the disease is much more widespread, a study said. Researchers led by Dr. Sheldon Landesman of State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn found that 2% of 602 women delivering babies at an inner-city hospital in New York had antibodies to the AIDS virus in the blood of their umbilical cords. Almost half the women who tested positive said they did not know how they might have gotten the infection, suggesting that if blood samples had not been taken, their cases would have gone undetected, the researchers said.