Aging with AIDS

I saw Magic Johnson on Larry King Live last week after Obama's victory. I hadn't seen him in a while and it made me happy to see him looking so healthy. I worked for a college paper in 1991 when the news came out that he had HIV and I remember what a big deal it was, not just a sad news item, but the bigotry, homophobia and misinformation about AIDS. My God, remember all that?

It hasn't gone away, though we hear less about it now.

Anyway, a recent story in the New York Times, "Speaking out for a group one unheard-of: Aging with AIDS," reports on aging Americans with AIDS, some of whom (like Johnson) have lived a long time on anti-retrovirus drugs, but also elderly who catch the disease from lack of safe sex information and/or easy access to condoms:

In fact, 29 percent of those infected with H.I.V. are over 50. And because the immune system deteriorates with age, the virus is all the more aggressive in older people....

There is also an alarming rate of infection among older Americans. In 2005, 15 percent of new H.I.V. and AIDS diagnoses were among people over the age of 50, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet government recommendations call for routine AIDS screening only up to age 64, omitting the elderly population.

“What about people 65 and older?” Mr. Gold asked. “They’re having unprotected sex, they’re using drugs.”

He says that is why he continues his advocacy for people with AIDS and for stronger prevention efforts. He sits on both the New York and national boards of the nonprofit group Association of H.I.V. Over 50, attends City Council meetings and has spoken before Congress and the New York Legislature.

Not long ago, he visited a senior center in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn to discuss safe sex practices. The women who attended, “all over 80 years old,” he said later, rushed toward the table afterward for the free condoms he was distributing. (“They said to me, ‘It’s not for me, it’s for my grandson,’ ” he said.)

Politicians don’t like to talk about the spread of AIDS among the elderly, Mr. Gold says; nobody wants to hear about Grandma’s sex life. But he adds that change cannot happen without open discussion.

h/t to Beth Haller at Media Dis&Dat