older aids infections

Anybody else think this is fairly shoddy journalism? It’s a classic reporter error to mistake a small movement in a counterintuitive niche into a full-blown trend.
The link to the story reads: HIV cases increasingly older and straighter. But the story doesn’t include anything at all about HIV becoming more of a heterosexual problem. (Michael Fumento, despite occasionally being something of a nutcase and having an alarming love for animated GIFs, has written often and persuasively about the media’s attempts to make AIDS seem more heterosexual than it is. On one hand, it’s a laudable attempt to bring attention to a serious problem; on the other, though, it’s something of an insult to the gays whose deaths are apparently not enough of a tragedy to get people interested.)
The thrust of the story is about an alleged boom in AIDS infections among the elderly. There’s only one fact in the story to back this up: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the proportion of Americans over 50 with AIDS has risen steadily from 10 percent in the early 1990s to 13.4 percent in 1999, the most recent figures available.”
First off, the phrasing’s wrong: it should be the proportion of Americans with AIDS who are over 50, not the other way around. (It’s not as if 13.4 percent of old people have AIDS; it’s that 13.4 percent of people with AIDS are old.)
Second, the story omits an extraordinarily obvious point. Think about it: there are two ways to be an old person with AIDS. First, you could contract HIV at an old age. Or second, you could be contract HIV at a younger age and just live longer.
In the 1980s, before AZT, before protease inhibitors, AIDS wasn’t something you lived with for decades. Once symptoms developed, you generally died in short order. Now, of course, people can live a decade or more with proper medication. So let’s say you were a 42-year-old gay man in 1990, and you contracted HIV. Thanks to protease cocktails, you’re now a thriving 54-year-old man with HIV. Sure, you’d be part of that 3.4 percent increase in older AIDS patients, but it’s got nothing to do with older people getting infected more often, the thesis of the story.
The only anecdote given in the story is of Jane Fowler, a 67-year-old with HIV. But the story points out she contracted HIV from a man she was dating 17 years ago! How can an infection in 1985 be part of a rising infection trend today? The fact she’s lived longer is, however, sign that it’s people living longer that’s behind any numerical rise.
Even the big official quote in the story — “It is an area we want to be concerned about,” said Robert Janssen, director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. “Potentially there is a risk of there being increases in new infections in older people” — is not convincing. (Any reporter will tell you that’s exactly the kind of fuzzy quote you get if you call someone up and say: “Hi, I’m doing a story about this growing problem. Isn’t it a growing problem?”)
Maybe the basis of the story is accurate, and more old people are being infected. But the reporter hasn’t done anything to prove it here.