Majority people usually don’t think of a sexual way of spreading various infections: people only know about such infection vehicles as AIDS and venereal diseases. Meanwhile, according to a survey conducted at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, human herpes-8 virus (HHV-8) initiating Kaposi’s sarcoma could be transmitted during sexual acts.

Kaposi’s sarcoma is a tumor typically produced in the form of purple spots on internal organs (abdominal cavity and chest) and on a skin.

This kind of cancer has been known over a century. Generally, people living in Southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa were carriers of this disease. However, in the early 1980s Kaposi’s sarcoma began penetrating to the USA and Western Europe. The Kaposi’s sarcoma epidemic then started spreading among homosexuals, but remained unnoticed on the background of AIDS, a new terrible sickness.

Kaposi’s sarcoma generally develops in a human organism with a disordered immune protection capability. That’s why the disease easily influences AIDS-diagnosed people.

This kind of cancer can effectively be treated by means of chemotherapy which, unfortunately, sometimes might induce metastases and lead to fatal consequences.

The HHV-8 was first discovered by researchers of the University of Columbia in 1994. The HHV-8 is so far the latest known “addition” to a generation of human herpes viruses which are responsible for development of mouth and genital herpes, chickenpox and infectious mononucleosis.

Despite the previously conducted studies showed that in the USA the HHV-8 was more widely spread among people who had frequent sexual contacts, the exact HHV-8 transfer mechanism remained unclear. Besides, in Africa and Southern Europe the virus is transmitted via another, non-sexual, way. Risks of falling ill with sarcoma are hierarchically structured as follows:

1. Sexual contacts with a person suffering from Kaposi’s sarcoma
2. Saliva exchange during kisses with a HHV-carrier
3. Use of amyl nitrite or inhalation of nitrites (for this case, reliable information on getting ill with sarcoma is not available).

An opinion that sarcoma development is on decline is far from reality, since it’s based only on the available statistical information which shows that percentage of people suffering from Kaposi’s sarcoma goes down. These statistic data reflects a reduction in sarcoma sickness rate of people who were identified as a HHV-8 carrier, in comparison with an early stage of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. This situation is likely to have happened owing to a progress in treating AIDS-patients with drugs that allowed to prevent further damage of human immune system.

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