May 16, 2008
PREVENTION IN PERIL
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Cash alone won't prevent HIV, but the epidemic won't end without it (flickr.com/photos/tracy_olson/61056391/) |
With George Bush on the way out and revised (for the worse) national estimates of yearly HIV infections on the way in, calls are coming from all quarters to up funding for HIV prevention and find new ways to stem the AIDS epidemic.
At a Congressional briefing on Monday (aired on C-SPAN), AIDS advocates pushed for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to double its annual prevention budget to $1.3 billion. Organizations that participated in the briefing, including the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, Gay Men's Health Crisis and the AIDS Institute, tried to connect the dots for Congressional staffers: While the CDC is planning to announce a much-anticipated increase in yearly HIV infections in the U.S., the Bush administration wants to reduce the agency's prevention budget by $1 million.
"We need to keep on highlighting that the CDC funding is going down," said The AIDS Institute's director of federal affairs Carl Schmid. "A lot of the community is focused on Ryan White, and prevention seems to get the shaft."
Just a week ago CDC director Julie Gerberding, speaking at a forum in Oakland, CA admitted, "We have not succeeded in our prevention efforts" and called for more funding and outreach to African Americans, especially men who have sex with men. Last year, Gerberding said that her Bush administration superiors had hamstrung her efforts at the CDC.
Here in New York City,
Davids said she feels, as CHAMP's slogan "No Magic Bullet" suggests, that there will possibly never be a single cure to the HIV/AIDS epidemic and a solution can only be reached by demanding a comprehensive platform of trials associated with prevention research.
When asked if she thought Gerberding was speaking more freely with Dubya on the way out, Davids said, "She certainly could have spoken about [prevention funding] at any time."
Bush's replacement could be a godsend for prevention activists—or a disaster. Sen. Barack Obama wants to increase federal funds for HIV prevention programs and his AIDS plan calls for ramping up testing in the African American community. Sen. John McCain supports the famously backward abstinence-only-until-marriage approach. Check out the SIECUS prevention fact sheet on both candidates (and Sen. Hillary Clinton).
Startling increases
At the CHAMP forum, guest speaker Monica Ruiz, Ph.D. from the Foundation for AIDS Research presented an overview of how federal money is spent, noting that only four percent of the federal AIDS budget was allocated to prevention research in 2006. Another problem Ruiz notes is the correlation between the leveling off of federal funding in the President's Budget since 2004 and the rising cost of research due to inflation. "They have not taken into account the dollar's purchasing power," Ruiz said. She estimates the purchasing power of the dollar to have decreased 12 percent since 2004.
Beryl Koblin, Ph.D. from the Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention gave a synopsis of recent research findings on HIV infection rates in New York City. Koblin explained that even though the overall rate of HIV infection in New York City has steadily decreased over the last five years, there has been a startling increase in transmissions among men who have sex with men and heterosexual women. Men who have sex with men with known risk make up more than 75 percent of new HIV diagnosis, and the diagnosis rate is approximately four times higher in blacks than it is in whites.
Following hot on the heels of all this prevention talk is Sunday, May 18's HIV Vaccine Awareness Day, created to redouble worldwide efforts to find a cure for AIDS. The recent failure of the Merck vaccine (MrkAd5), which did not reduce the risk of contracting HIV or reduce the viral load among those who became infected, has cast a pall over those efforts.