US News & World Report ran an interesting article on Aging of AIDS, by Mary B. Marcus. This article explained how AIDS is reaching into the ranks of senior citizens and afflicting them through heterosexual sex.

According to this article, more senior citizens are attending AIDS and safe-sex seminars than before. This could be because more senior HIV/AIDS cases are present than the public is aware of: in Dade County Florida, 20% of the AIDS cases are senior citizens; a senior citizen is one 50-years and older. In this county in Florida, 44% of the senior women with HIV/AIDS and 18% of the senior men were infected through heterosexual sex.

A program director in Florida said that the county is at the very beginning of this senior epidemic and that in the next decade or two, the present numbers will rise. Another group that assists HIV/AIDS infected individuals said that last year, nationwide, 14% of its clientele were senior citizens, and that was an eight percent increase.

To many this new development is alarming because we wrongly assume that senior citizens have given up on the joys of the bed. We often forget that former President Bill Clinton is a senior citizen, and we have heard of his voracious sexual appetite as a senior citizen in the White House.

With the new and popular drugs that are on the market, young men are vaunting their manliness, and old men are becoming men again; resultantly, there is an increase in late-term sexual activity among seniors. It should not be forgotten that the seniors of today are the baby-boomers, and their sexual liaisons were as free as the air and as ubiquitous.

There are unique problems with HIV/AIDS in seniors that are not present in younger adults: with seniors, doctors do not think to diagnose their systems as HIV/AIDS. Many doctors operate on the same general assumption that the general society makes--they are past the engagement in the act. Therefore, seniors may have ailments that may seem or may be a natural part of aging, and although those ailments may mimic symptoms associated in HIV/AIDS infected patients, the doctor will assume aging and not check for AIDS.

Another problems with AIDS in the aged is how their families will respond to them. Some seniors infected with AIDS report that their families, an important component in treatment, are viewing them not with sympathy but with shame, even revulsion.

AIDS in seniors may pose an entirely new set of problems for the health care system of this nation if their numbers increase significantly. Unlike younger AIDS sufferers, seniors are politically connected, they vote, they are better equipped financially, and they may be able to control where healthcare dollars are spent. That means that they may be able to redirect the current spending patterns in healthcare toward themselves instead of their children.

Finally, a point we should never forget about these seniors is this: with the advent of Viagra and other sex potency drugs, our seniors are active again, and this generation of seniors--the baby boomers--never had a problem with free and frequent sex. If their attitudes are the same today as they were during their generation, there could be a crisis among our seniors in their renewed sexual activity and all the consequences involved in free and frequent sex.

We can only hope that time and experience have moderated their once easy sexual mores. []
Gibbs staff