AIDS study hits home
More effort must be dedicated to fighting epidemic within United States
This August will be remembered as a defining moment in America’s history with AIDS – a time when we simultaneously realized our potential to affect the global epidemic and learned of our dramatic failure to control it at home.
First, Congress passed an expanded version of President Bush’s global AIDS initiative. Washington pledged to spend billions to fund treatment abroad, taking a bold and exemplary step in fighting the disease.
That was the good news.
Then, on Aug. 2, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a much-awaited study confirming our worst fears about HIV/AIDS at home. The agency told us that the domestic epidemic is at least 40 percent larger than we had believed since the early 1990s.
Together, the two moments highlight a sad truth: Even as we have scaled up our global efforts, American policymakers have watched idly as the U.S. epidemic has spiraled out of control, particularly in black communities.
As the CDC acknowledged upon releasing its study, even by the old estimate, funding to keep HIV at bay in the United States has lagged far behind the need. Throughout the Bush era, AIDS funding domestically has remained flat across the board, and in some areas has been reduced.
All the while, we now know, the epidemic was growing by as many as 58,500 new infections a year.
Nearly half of those infections – 45 percent in 2006 – have been among black Americans, who account for just 13 percent of the population.
Our failure isn’t limited to prevention. The AIDS treatment and care safety net that we built in the early 1990s is in tatters.
Every year, hundreds of uninsured Americans – largely in the Southeast – linger on waiting lists for lifesaving AIDS treatments. In 2006, South Carolina acknowledged that four people died while awaiting treatment there.
That’s not in Uganda or any other resource-poor country on the other side of the globe. That’s right here in America – poor and uninsured people dropping dead while awaiting access to AIDS drugs.
This is a shocking public health failure, and one that is as shameful as our new global leadership is laudable. It’s long past time we return to leading the fight to save lives at home, too.