Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 18, 1994 TAG: 9401180036
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Sandra Blakeslee THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Men and women over age 50 seem to think they will not be infected with the disease, researchers said, when in fact 10 percent of AIDS cases, including those of gay men, are diagnosed each year in that age group. The highest rate of heterosexual transmission of AIDS occurs in people over 50, they said.
The survey was conducted by Dr. Ron Stall and Dr. Joe Catania of the University of California in San Francisco and is described in the Jan. 10 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Younger people seem to be getting the message about ways to protect themselves against AIDS, Stall said. But for older people there has been no discussion or public health warning. "When have you ever seen an AIDS poster with a wrinkled face?" he said.
To find out what older Americans are doing to protect themselves against AIDS, the researchers culled 3,188 interviews with people over the age of 50 from large national surveys on the disease. "We focused on heterosexuals and looked for specific risk factors," Stall said.
Ten percent of the men and women said they had had multiple sexual partners or a blood transfusion in the 1980s before AIDS screening was widely available, Stall said. Despite these risk factors, he said, older people were six times less likely to use condoms and five times less likely to have tests for AIDS than people in their 20s with similar risk factors.
"We heard a lot of people say `Thank God, this wasn't around in my day,' " Stall said. "But it is around in their day. It's such a horrible epidemic. It's easy to deny your own risk."
Physicians tend to ignore AIDS risk factors in their older patients, said Dr. Mitchell Feldman, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. "They assume older people don't have sex and are not at risk," he said. "But not only are they having sex, they are not taking precautions. This research adds further weight to earlier observations that the sexual activity of older people is often not in the context of a safe, monogamous relationship."
People over age 50 have consistently accounted for 10 percent of the AIDS case since the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began keeping track of the numbers, and in the mid-1980s the proportion was higher before effective screening of donated blood began. More than 33,000 people over 50 are now infected with AIDS.
Education programs about HIV for older Americans are badly needed, Feldman said. They would reduce the risk in that age group, he said, and "trickle down" to younger Americans who may conclude that if their parents act as if they risk contracting AIDS, they too are face a risk.
by CNB