Can't people enjoy their golden years in peace and happiness without a lot of fussy folks scaring them half to death with a BOGUS blood test and other misinformation? Perhaps it is all very well-meaning, creating a panic so that people will not become "complacent" about a public health crisis. But this kind of panic mongering creates real consequences for real people. And, really, going after seniors?

The CDC itself has stated that more than 1,000 sexual contacts with an infected person is needed for HIV transmission to occur. Really. So when senior citizens "test positive for HIV," I would rather question the sexual-transmission theory than their sexual judgment over one encounter that happened in, say, 1958.

No one is warned of the consequences a false-positive HIV test result might have for the rest of their life. The warnings about the test's inaccuracies and lack of diagnostic utility are in the package, but I would be willing to bet that these are not posted at the testing sites. The risk of a false-positive is multiplied in people who carry more antibodies as they age, and who take flu shots. The test is currently under scrutiny in a product liability case filed by a Kansas woman who has suffered immensely from its results--including surviving a murder attempt from a husband who hoped to collect life insurance money. One of this article's subjects was denied health insurance. Others have had their privacy invaded.

We are informed by this article that seniors--and Americans in general--don't want to get tested because they are "timid in talking about sex." Really? When did this happen? More specifically, when did this happen in the article, in which seniors talk pretty openly about it?

You have a responsibility here to tell the truth and to tell it clearly, using honestly defined terminology. Though this is rarely said in journalistic circles, you also have a responsibility to apply reason, that is, to make a judgment call as to the logic of your sources. And you have to make sense yourself.

It's hard to know where to start:

"Senior citizen" seems to be freely defined in this article as anywhere from 45 and over to 65 and over. HIV statistics on people over 50 (50, mind you) are given without noting whether they are higher than they were before, or whether they refer to the proportion of seniors who are HIV positive or their proportion in the HIV positive population as a whole.

There is no evidence anywhere that "methods of diagnosis . . . and medication have improved considerably," particularly in people over 65. Neither has the virus ever been shown to "attack the immune system" by any known mechanism.

In sum, this is one of the worst pieces of "AIDS Awareness Month" journalism that I have yet seen--an assault on reason. AIDS reporting is already the lowest quality journalism in history. After studying HIV and AIDS for 14 years, I have found nothing about them that makes sense anyway. The only piece I can think of that stoops lower than this is the ad hominem attack on Berkeley scientists by UCSF scientists -- using vague accusations of racism -- which, not surprisingly, was also published by Salon, back in the '90s. The low standard continues.

Check www.virusmyth.com for more info before this letter gets zapped off the site.