Face of AIDS is Growing Older in Tarrant County, Texas

Joseph Manuel assumed that he would never get AIDS. He was older than 40, white, middle class and heterosexual. He didn't belong to any demographic groups targeted for safer sex messages. He might have worn a condom had he been 10 years younger, Manuel said. Like others his age, Manuel believed that he was safe as long as he had sex within his peer group. So when Manuel learned in April 1998 that he had AIDS, he was surprised -- as was his girlfriend. "She went ballistic," said Manuel, 44, of Fort Worth, Texas. "Now we don't even speak anymore." When Manuel found out that he had AIDS, he was sure that he would die. He spent more than six hours a day hooked to an IV next to cancer patients having chemotherapy at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth.

Increasingly, new AIDS patients in Tarrant County, Texas, are older than 40 and middle class, public health experts say. They are older and sicker at diagnosis than in the past, said Elvin Adams, an AIDS outreach center physician with Tarrant County Health Department. Department figures indicate that in 1993 about 26 percent of the new AIDS diagnoses were among patients 40 and older. By 2000, that number increased to 45 percent. During the same period, the number of newly diagnosed AIDS patients age 50 and older increased to 10 percent from 7 percent.

"There certainly are not enough educational programs directed at older people to make them aware that they are at risk of getting this disease," Jane P. Fowler said, national coordinator of the National Association on HIV over Fifty. "That younger doctor is sitting across the desk from someone who looks like his grandmother, and they don't point out the risks."

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