Ground-breaking new research has shown that as the average age of people living with HIV in Britain rises they are facing huge financial and social problems related to their condition.
Produced jointly by the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) and Age UK, the first national study of its kind looked at the implications of the illness on people over 50, many of whom expected to have died sooner after being diagnosed back in the 1990s before effective treatment was available. Today, someone diagnosed with HIV in their 30s can expect to live into their 70s, with proper treatment.
The investigation revealed that, while effective drug treatment can dramatically lengthen the lifespan of HIV-positive individuals, it does age people far faster, throwing up implications for the future care of patients – often gay men who are feeling socially isolated.
There are now an estimated 90,000 people living with HIV in the UK, with almost a third of those infected unaware of their status. Last year one in six of those receiving treatment for HIV was aged over 50.
Lisa Power, policy director of the trust, who will present her report to the World Aids Conference in Vienna on Wednesday, said the research had thrown up a lot of surprises, not least that older people living with HIV were experiencing far more health problems than other people of the same age.
"Whether it is a result of treatments, the rough and ready ones that were first available in the late 90s, or the result of how long they were ill before they were diagnosed and began effective treatments is not clear, and more clinical work needs to be done on that. This does paint a clear picture, though, of people living with HIV and over 50 being really much more financially poorer and socially isolated than their peers. They have been systematically disadvantaged and have huge fears about the future in terms of social care; many had experienced a lot of discrimination, interestingly not from disclosing their status socially, but in healthcare and in the workplace."
When former British Telecom manager Julian Hows, now 54, was told in 1990 he had HIV he said it felt like a death sentence. "I was going to die, so I left my job, cashed in my pension and went off round the world, did all my credit cards," he said. "Five years later I was still alive, which was a bit of a shock. I had burned a lot of bridges, I was out of the jobs market. A lot of friends had died."
When the first treatments came in, in the late 1990s, Hows was, like many others, a guinea pig for often toxic drugs that kept them alive but with side-effects still little understood.
He suffers from a weak chest and has had repeated bouts of pneumonia. "We all look towards old age with a certain fear, but without HIV I would have been looking forward to a comfortable retirement, the mortgage paid off. Now, for those of us over 50, we face the vagaries of state care, our social networks depleted, so those fears are very much heightened."