FYI, Agouron's earnings are on October 20th, after the bell.
As far as that 20/20 program, that's right <approximately 10% of AIDS cases in the US now occur in persons over 50 years of age> and there is very little awareness in this population of the growing problem. CNN's Impact featured The New Face of AIDS: Senior Citizens on April 18th, so it's not new news. Actually, the number of young teenage girls being infected is growing at higher rates as well, and teenage girls now account for 49% of AIDS cases in the 13-19 year age group.
Few equate AIDS with seniors or teenagers but age is no protection against AIDS. Parents and grandparents are falling to the disease. Florida has the highest percentage of seniors infected with AIDS through heterosexual contact. Although gay men still make up the majority of older AIDS cases, the number of women with the disease is growing quickly.
Sue Saunders, decided to speak out, for good reason. "Studies show that heterosexual seniors are much less likely to use condoms or get tested for HIV than younger people, even though they take the same risks. They're getting it through sexual intercourse, not blood transfusions. I think the most common myth is that after 50 they die from the neck down. But seniors are having more fun in the sexual realm than the younger people. They're retired, they have plenty of time to play." And plenty of opportunity. In South Florida, older women are said to outnumber the men by seven to one, which means a number of women date one man. Saunders calls these senior Romeo's "condo cowboys." "And they don't use safe sex. They could have HIV, but they've never been tested."
Jane Fowler also wishes she'd known just how dangerous, and just how wrong her assumptions were. She never thought her life could be touched by AIDS. She was a journalist and mother when her 23-year marriage ended in divorce. She began dating again, men she had known for years, who were educated and had professional careers. She didn't know that one of them had AIDS and didn't find out that she herself was infected until years later, when a health insurance company rejected her after a routine blood test. When she learned she was HIV positive, she totally retreated from her former life, as she feared discrimination and rejection. She finally came out of her shell when the man who infected her died and she went to work at an AIDS support agency and began to tell her story publicly. She says: "I'm infected and I live with HIV, look at this face, this old, wrinkled face is another face of HIV."
Even more worrisome, doctors often fail to detect the virus in older patients in time to help them, because the normal symptoms of old age mask the disease. When someone who's 60 years old walks into a doctor's office, and says they feel tired, the doctor will not think of HIV as the first possibility. Infected seniors are often reluctant to talk about their sex lives, and younger physicians and nurses may not feel comfortable talking to someone who they perceive to be the age of their grandmother or their mother or father about sex. The diagnosis of AIDS in seniors is often too late for treatment to be effective, and there is a much higher death rate in this group, in many cases within months of diagnosis.
Another population that is being infected with HIV at higher rates than ever, many from unprotected heterosexual sex are young teenage girls, between the ages of 13-19, particularly minorities and those from low-income families.
"When girls have unprotected sex, they're more worried about getting pregnant than about getting HIV,'' said Tricia Murray, 19, who helped run a Girls in Charge seminar in the city's South Boston section this summer. "They still don't see it as something that teen-agers like them can't get.'' "Most of the programs out there were invented to address other populations like adults, homosexual males, IV drug users,'' said Girls in Charge coordinator Judah-Abijah Dorrington.
Between 1990 and 1995, AIDS cases increased 103 percent for women, and just 27 percent for men, according to a CDC study. "It suggests younger women are now as apt to acquire HIV as young men," said Dr. Cynthia Gomez, an assistant professor at the Center for AIDS Prevention Center at the University of California at San Francisco. "That's a major shift in the trend."
Only 25 states report HIV cases, although all states must report AIDS diagnoses. Based on HIV prevalence estimates, there are a minimum of 60,000 to 115,000 HIV-positive women in the country who haven't yet been diagnosed with AIDS.
"(Young women) really are being viewed as the population with the largest number of new infections," Gomez said. "They don't realize they're at risk, partly because we've so much emphasized certain groups, rather than behaviors. And HIV doesn't discriminate."
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