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By Robert Best, Nation Newspaper Barbados February 4, 2003 THE STATISTIC which shows that Barbadians over 60 are being infected with HIV/AIDS should come as no surprise. In our country it is known that a growing number of people are surviving beyond age 60 because of a number of factors, including better health care. It also signals that a higher percentage of these elderly will manage to be sexually active, with or without Viagra. However, the problem is not that these senior citizens are sexy, but that they are promiscuous and have been indulging in unprotected sex. At a symposium last week sponsored by the National Committee for the Prevention of Alcoholism and Drug Dependency (NCPADD), Minister of Health Senator Jerome Walcott, noted that the signs were there of old men having unprotected sex with younger women and the 60-plus group now had an increasing number of people with HIV/AIDS. Between 1984 and last year, he said, 94 elderly people had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, a figure he referred to as having the likelihood of “becoming an interesting statistic.” That apart, there is a lot more that is interesting where our society and the sexually active over 60 group is concerned. Those in this age group would not have spent their younger days in an environment like today where sexual abstinence is being pushed, or promiscuity condemned in the strong terms we are hearing. Thoughts of “sowing wild oats” would have been regarded as part of the rites of passage for this generation. Furthermore, if any of them wanted to have evidence of how much “sowing” had gone on, they would only have to look around them and see where in the villages men had fathered children from more than one woman, at times in cases where the women were neighbours in the gap. This, too, accounted for a large number of children being born out of wedlock, eventually prompting our lawmakers to devise laws that would give such children the same rights, under certain circumstances, as children of married couples. It is not without reason, that we are urging our young people not to be promiscuous, to practise sexual abstinence, have one partner or practise “safe sex”. We have had problems with promiscuous behaviour even before HIV/AIDS came on the scene and added a deadly factor. At the same time, there has always been a number of old men who favoured young women as partners and young women who gravitated to older men, with some claiming because of the older men’s experience in certain matters or because of their money. The idea often voiced that it was “better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave” was born out of such experiences and escapades. But now there is HIV/AIDS and the sexy senior citizens who still want to get around as if the sexual environment is what it was like in the halcyon days of their youth, will inevitably find themselves in for more than a shock. HIV/AIDS does not discriminate where age is concerned nor does past experience make any difference if one is not prepared to behave according to present day demands. The issues of morality have always been with us and will always remain. However, while calling for, and urging people towards a high standard of moral behaviour, which if followed, would certainly go a long way towards preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS, we still must make allowances for those who will slip and slide. Claiming that the elderly who are sexually active should know better than to be sleeping around and “spending their money on young women” will in no way solve the problem which threatens as more and more people in the over 60 age group become victims of HIV/AIDS. The victims of the disease among the 16 to 45 age group remain a main concern among our health authorities. If senior citizens are seeking sexual partners among those in the 16 to 45 age group, it follows that they could be exposing themselves to the disease since it is in this age group that the disease continues to take its heaviest toll. Conversely, where these elderly already have the disease and go after younger partners, then they are just building up the disturbing statistics, if they do not take steps to protect them. Last week President George Bush said that he will ask the United States Congress to “commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.” That is a lot of money but already those who are leading the fight have warned that it will take even more, with predictions that 70 million people will die from AIDS in the next 20 years if more money is not spent to curb the spread of the disease. At a time when we are hearing much talk about weapons of mass destruction, with part of that focus being on biological warfare, AIDS has shown that it is capable of the mass annihilation, when the people themselves, young and old, assist in its spread. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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