Three decades after its
emergence, AIDS has a new face:
people over 50
By Michael Anft
Photographs by Gavin Thomas
IT ANNOUNCED ITSELF AMONG THE YOUNG. FIVE O THER-
wise healthy men in Los Angeles had been stricken by
a rare, debilitating form of pneumonia. Baffled doctors
reported the news in June of 1981, and, soon after, other
scientists revealed a medical mystery of their own: young
men with a skin cancer usually found among the elderly.
Within 18 months, the federal government linked
the afflictions to a new disease that it named “acquired
immune deficiency syndrome,” or AIDS. By 1983, when
scientists isolated the human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV) as the cause, 1,300 Americans had died—most of
them under 40. Thirty years on, though, AIDS is increasingly a disease of older people, who make up the fastest-growing segment of the HIV-positive population. Of the
estimated 1. 1 million Americans with HIV, some 407,000
are over 50; by 2017, half of the total HIV-positive
