She's the girl next door. At 23 years old, blond and pouty-lipped, Kaitlin Morrison of Port Hardy, B.C., looks like the middle class's worst fear of the HIV epidemic in Canada. Unlike stereotypical images of the disease-scabby drug users slouched on Vancouver sidewalks or near-death Zimbabweans lying in grass-and-mud huts-she looks like she could play soccer for SFU.

On May 26, she showed up in Maclean's magazine as "The new face of HIV". On July 4, she graced page A9 of the Province: "HIV found spreading more quickly among young heterosexual women," read the headline. The same story ran in the July 4 Victoria Times-Colonist.

The stories are based on a December 31, 2004, HIV epidemiology report from the Public Health Agency of Canada. It states that new HIV infections are rising among Cana?dian women aged 15 to 29. Not only that, but 60 percent of the new infections come from sex, not shared needles or blood transfusions.

But a UBC professor of epidemiology told the Georgia Straight the numbers don't necessarily support the spectre of a looming HIV epidemic for Canada's healthy, clean, sexually active youth.

"The problem with the messages we're given is that people look at the message [that HIV will infect you if you have unprotected sex] and they look at what they see around them, and the difference needs to be explained," Dr. Richard Mathias told the Georgia Straight.

Mathias offered a reason there isn't already an HIV epidemic among Vancouver's club crowd or university crew: if a man and a woman have unprotected sex, he said, and both are in good sexual health apart from an HIV infection, the chance of transmission is about one in 500 sexual contacts. It's still not good odds. He compared it to a one-in-500 chance of a car crash when driving-participants should clearly use protection. Worry about catching HIV, he suggested, but worry more about catching chlamydia or gonorrhea, which are much more common sexually transmitted diseases and can compromise the body's ability to fight off the virus.

Across Canada in 2004, 221 women between the ages of 15 and 29 were newly diagnosed with HIV, according to PHAC's surveillance reports. Five years ago, it was 189. Mathias said the numbers have not jumped dramatically enough to cause a panic. In fact, more thorough HIV testing for pregnant women, together with more consistent health reporting, could mean the numbers reflect better health administration rather than a real rise in HIV infections, he said.

Across town, though, the coordinator of AIDS Vancouver's women's program, Roseanne Johnson, thinks that young, sexually active women should be worried about AIDS, and she is worried for them. It's not just the current numbers that concern her; it's the potential for a future epidemic among Vancouver's young, heterosexual, healthy community.

"There's an estimated 18,000 people in Canada who have HIV and don't know it," Johnson explained to the Straight. If some of them are heterosexual and having unprotected sex, she said, the seeds of a mass infection could be spreading undetected.

"I know I sound like Chicken Little and the sky is falling, but this isn't rocket science," she said. "If we don't pay attention to it, 10 years from now we'll notice friends and acquaintances becoming HIV-positive."

Something else that's not rocket science to Johnson: the known fact that the number of young women with HIV is rising. She doesn't understand why the news release that spurred the news stories, published by the B.C. Persons With AIDS Society, YouthCo Aids Society, and the Positive Women's Network, has received so much attention.

"This is such old news; we've known about it for years," she said. "Of course, all publicity is good, and people are always ignoring the issue of women with HIV."

Speaking on behalf of AIDS Vancouver's prevention team, Johnson said a real problem in preventing the spread of HIV among young women is the approach to AIDS education. Instead of targeting women, who she said know all about condoms but who often lack the power to enforce their use, the entire heterosexual community should be educated instead, including hetero men.

Anecdotally, she said she's seeing more and more women in prisons with HIV. She said she believes it's not just effective testing that's increasing HIV rates among young women: she has personally seen the rise in infections in the female heterosexual population.

In the Downtown Eastside and Granville Street area, Ray Croy works with HIV- positive women through the Positive Women's Network's young women's program. That part of Vancouver is where HIV is found in large numbers among young heterosexual women, she said, which is why her program is there.

"Poverty, abusive situations, post-traumatic stress disorder, a mishmash of drug issues, survival sex work, and addiction-women who have no privilege to make choices," is how she explained why the women she works with are vulnerable to the disease.

For the past three years, Croy has worked in housing programs in the DTES. She told the Straight that almost every woman she encountered was HIV-positive. The rise in young heterosexual infections, she said, "doesn't surprise me at all".

Regarding everyone infected with the virus, Mathias said the most encouraging thing is treatment. "AIDS deaths are way down," he said. "We really have things to offer now. If you think you've been exposed, get a test. We want to keep people asymptomatic instead of trying to get them back after they're sick. If you're pregnant, the sooner you get tested the better, so we can make plans for preventing transmission to the baby."

Mathias wants to see those rising young women's stats drop, too.