Living With HIV For People Over 50 Years

Living With HIV For People Over 50 Years.
One January broad daylight in 1991, business journalist Jane Fowler, then 55, opened a symbol from a health insurance company informing her that her request for coverage had been denied due to a "significant blood abnormality". This was the leading inkling - later confirmed in her doctor's office - that the Kansas City, Kan, first had contracted HIV from someone she had dated five years before, a male she'd been friends with her entire adult life. She had begun seeing him two years after the end of her 24-year marriage.

Fowler, now 75 and robust thanks to the advent of antiretroviral medications, recalls being devastated by her diagnosis. "I went deeply that day and literally took to my bed. I thought, 'What's successful to happen?'" she said. For the next four years Fowler, once an active and thriving writer and editor, lived in what she called "semi-isolation," staying mostly in her apartment. Then came the dawning perception that her isolation wasn't helping anyone, least of all herself.

Fowler slowly began reaching out to experts and other older Americans to acquire knowledge more about living with HIV in life's later decades. By 1995, she had helped co-found the National Association on HIV Over 50. And through her program, HIV Wisdom for Older Women, Fowler today speaks to audiences nationwide on the challenges of living with the virus. "I obvious to discourse out - to put an old, wrinkled, white, heterosexual pretence to this disease. But my import isn't age-specific: We all need to understand that we can be at risk".

That point may be more urgent than ever this Wednesday, World AIDS Day. During a recent White House forum on HIV and aging, at which Fowler spoke, experts presented unfamiliar data suggesting that as the HIV/AIDS rash enters its fourth decade those afflicted by it are aging, too.

One report, conducted by the AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA), esteemed that 27 percent of Americans diagnosed with HIV are now age-old 50 or older and by 2015 that percentage could double. Why? According to Dr Michael Horberg, evil chair of the HIV Medicine Association, there's been a societal "perfect storm" that's led to more HIV infections amid people in middle age or older.

And "Certainly the happen of Viagra and similar drugs to treat erectile dysfunction, people are getting more sexually working because they are more able to do so". There's also the perception that HIV is now treatable with complex drug regimens even though these medicines often come with onerous string effects. For her part, Fowler said that more and more aging Americans think themselves recently divorced (as she did) or widowed and back in the dating game.