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The term older adults refers to people over 50 years of age, although this categorization includes individuals with a wide variety of different life circumstances, health conditions, and HIV risk behaviors. Research on HIV and its health threat to individuals of both genders over age 50 has been limited, even though by the mid-1990s more than 10 percent of new cases came from this age group. Because most AIDS-education efforts have targeted younger people, and because many physicians do not think of older people as sexually active beings or to include sexually transmitted diseases as diagnostic possibilities for them, it is difficult to assess the role of older adults in the epidemic. Yet in parts of the developing world, AIDS has diminished the number of elders in society, and in the developed world, growth in the over-50 population poses severe problems by adding AIDS care to an already overburdened system of long-term care facilities.