News

Ageing with HIV: The hidden side of world’s Aids crisis

3 August 2010

The world will face a mighty social and medical challenge as millions of people with HIV survive into old age, the world AIDS forum has heard.

The problem is only now becoming apparent as the first generation living with the human immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV) head towards their 60th birthday and beyond, thanks to the lifeline of antiretroviral drugs, say specialists.

These survivors are mainly in western nations, where the precious therapy first became available from 1996.

But they will soon be followed by millions of counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa and other poor countries where the drug rollout started in the middle of the last decade.

That these men and women should have stayed the course is itself a stunning testimony to antiretrovirals and, say some of the survivors themselves, something of a miracle.

Lisa Power, policy director with the British AIDS charity the Terrence Higgins Trust, said that even though people with HIV were living longer, their quality of life was often darkly overshadowed by worry.

Her organisation carried out a questionnaire of 410 people with HIV aged more than 50 living in Britain, which was then followed up with 40 in-depth interviews.

The respondents were likelier to be unemployed than healthy counterparts and had meagre savings, often because they had expected to die before they got old and so had never put money to one side.

“In the future we are going to see patients living decades, and we are going to have to figure out ways of getting them to a healthy old age,” said Margaret Hoffman-Terry of the American Academy of HIV Medicine.

Read the full article at AFP.