Ask The Experts

Steroids and AIDS?

To submit a question about drug testing, supplements and related issues, send it to Kay Hawes at khawes@sportsmgt.com.

Q. I recently heard that some athletes had gotten AIDS from using steroids. Is there any way that could be true?

A. Actually yes, if they were using injectible steroids. It’s possible to get HIV, (human immunodeficiency virus), the virus that causes AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), by sharing needles with someone who has AIDS, whether you’re injecting steroids or a street drug.

An article written by Margery Eagan and published in The Boston Herald in late November pointed out that AIDS workers in the Boston area had recently encountered young athletes who were believed to have acquired HIV while using injectible steroids.

One was a 19-year-old football player headed to college, and the other was an 18-year-old wrestler, who told workers he was trying to move up a weight class. They came into the clinic within weeks of each other.

“Well-to-do, middle-to-upper class white kids is what they were,” Joe McKee, a counselor with the AIDS Project Worcester, told The Boston Herald.

Eagan wrote, “These two young men were not heroin addicts. They were not sleeping with heroin addicts. They were not gay. No, but like hundreds of thousands of other American high-school athletes, they were using steroids, and injecting steroids. And because you cannot legally buy a syringe in Massachusetts, they were sharing needles with other young athletes. Someone among them was infected with HIV. And both these young men contracted it.”

The two young men apparently came to an anonymous AIDS clinic after someone told them they could get AIDS from sharing needles to inject steroids. Both of them were tested, and both tests were positive for HIV.

“I don’t think they considered needle use with steroids to be dangerous,” McKee told The Boston Herald. “It never occurred to them. My sense from both of them was they thought it’d be like sharing an eyedropper for Visine. They did not make the connection.”

Unfortunately, it’s a connection many athletes don’t make until it’s too late. When educators, like those at Drug Free Sport, talk to student-athletes about the dangers of performance-enhancing substances, AIDS is certainly not on student-athletes’ minds.

“Acquiring any blood-borne pathogen is a real danger for those who inject steroids and share needles,” said Drug Free Sport’s legal relations and policy director, Andrea Wickerham. ”And we tell athletes that. Getting AIDS is a risk that all needle users face, whether they’re using the needle to inject themselves with steroids or with heroin.”