Living With HIV For People Over 50 Years

Living With HIV For People Over 50 Years.
One January daylight in 1991, trade journalist Jane Fowler, then 55, opened a inscribe from a health insurance company informing her that her request for coverage had been denied due to a "significant blood abnormality". This was the at the outset inkling - later confirmed in her doctor's office - that the Kansas City, Kan, original had contracted HIV from someone she had dated five years before, a the human race 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 salubrious thanks to the advent of antiretroviral medications, recalls being devastated by her diagnosis. "I went institution that day and literally took to my bed. I thought, 'What's prevalent to happen?'" she said. For the next four years Fowler, once an active and prospering writer and editor, lived in what she called "semi-isolation," staying mostly in her apartment. Then came the dawning understanding that her isolation wasn't helping anyone, least of all herself.

Fowler slowly began reaching out to experts and other older Americans to understand 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 decisive to anything to out - to put an old, wrinkled, white, heterosexual cheek to this disease. But my essence isn't age-specific: We all need to understand that we can be at risk".

That memorandum 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 remodelled data suggesting that as the HIV/AIDS general enters its fourth decade those afflicted by it are aging, too.

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

And "Certainly the take wing of Viagra and similar drugs to treat erectile dysfunction, people are getting more sexually quick 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 view effects. For her part, Fowler said that more and more aging Americans distinguish themselves recently divorced (as she did) or widowed and back in the dating game.