CDC's HIV program has gone through turnover at the top. They probably did want to exert message control and use the peer review process (an article in New England Journal of Medicine) to give all of this credibility. They also may have used the peer review process to circumvent message control by people in the upper levels of DHHS. CDC had trouble publishing an updated compendium of HIV prevention interventions a couple years ago, so they went the journal route both to have peer review and to circumvent problems with approvals within DHHS HQ. The outcome opf this new estimate does confirm the undercounting that many in the community have suspected. It does not settle the question of whether infection rates increased during the 90s.
I felt with certainty that there must be more to the picture that the press was presenting. Bush : an AIDS humanitarian. ha.
I'm really sick about this. He continues to reign despite lying to everyone and dishing out useless money to these unrealistic abstinan ce based programs. We need to raise hell about much more than just marriage. That is denial on our parts.
How any expenditure can be justified when it doesn't work at all is beyond me. It's like his & congress dishing out hundreds of billions of dollars to his privateer friends in Iraq to do nothing.
Sex is part of being a human being and a gay man especially. It is critical to our community. There would be no point at all to being gay without sexual relatedness. That defines us. And is unavoid able for young people. But we need to be safe and need programs to assure that. We need activism for more science and more community networks teaching social skills and safe sex.
Abstinance and a lack of connectedness is of no avail,.
Sexuality is integral to living and defines who we are.
But this Epidemic is not being met with adequate reality . Denial of the enormity of it's effect is virtual murder. Bush is throwing money at nothing.
Rich, I'm not sure I understand how peer review would affect this. Do you mean just that it was published?m I Don't now what legal role that has with the CDC.
Another interesting twist on this story...
All the mainstream media outlets reported that the country had approx. 56,000 new HIV infections in 2006, and that 53% of these new cases were gay men and 45% were African American. Most of the gay media outlets reported these same statistics, but notably left out the bit about 53% of the new cases were gay men. Gay.com mentioned the increase among African-Americans, but not one word about the increase among gay men.
Let's do some math...53% of 56,000 is just a hair under 30k new gay gay cases in 2006. Divide 30,000 by 365 days and you get 82 new gay cases a day.
82 new gay cases a day, 30,000 a year...
82 new gay cases a day, 30,000 a year...
82 new gay cases a day, 30,000 a year...
...that gay.com and other gay media outlets made no mention of, reporting everything else nearly word for word. Ahem...WTF??
82 gay men are converting every day and gay.com and other gay media outlets snip it from the report. Am I the only one that thinks that is plenty weird?
I agree, Jeff, that the way the number are reported is very meaningful. What you left out of your analysis is that 1/3 of new cases are among hetersexuals. CNN and MSNBC will report the number among gay men and blacks, yet not include the number of heterosexuals affected. Also, the 53% increase is among a group called "MSM." As strange as it seems, many men who are having gay sex, don't identify as "gay." Therefore, they are not reading the websites, blogs, and news in the gay community, and they do not have the social network to receive accurate AIDS information.
I understand. That doesn't change my primary point, which is that gay.com and other gay media outlets reported the part about increases in the African American community, but completely snipped the part about an even larger increase in the "gay" community (the originating news sources reported it as "gay" not "MSM"...either way, it was clipped.
August 17, 2006
Honorable Hillary Clinton
U.S. Senate
Senate Dirksen 428
Washington, DC 20510
Re: S.2823
Dear Senator Clinton:
It is with sadness that I learn about your efforts to block the bipartisan Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Modernization Act of 2006 (S. 2823) and gut the funding formula reforms supported by 19 of the 20 Senators on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. I must share with you the bewilderment of African Americans throughout the country who cannot understand why you are taking this stand against opening the door to more equitable funding that will chiefly benefit people of color who currently have nowhere to turn but the federal government.
African Americans have overtaken every other ethnic group to become the face of HIV/AIDS in America, and we all have a duty to ensure that every black American living with HIV/AIDS has equal access to the care and support services needed from the federal Ryan White CARE Act to stay healthy and stay alive.
As with most health care problems, people of color are now disproportionately impacted by HIV/AIDS, much more so than at any time since AIDS emerged in 1981. But the current Ryan White CARE Act funding formulas have never been updated to fit the changing epidemic, creating growing inequities that have thrown many patients onto waiting lists for life-saving drugs because money has run out in their states, particularly in the South.
Women of color in the South are 26 times more likely to be HIV- positive than white females. But a third of all Ryan White CARE Act funding is set aside for large metropolitan areas, and most of the states in the South will never qualify. African Americans make up 19 percent of the South's population, but accounted for over 60 percent of all new AIDS cases in 2003. Eight southern states have to treat the same number of people with HIV/AIDS as other states which get more funding under the outdated formulas.
The growing inequities are obvious and unacceptable. Addressing these gaps requires bipartisan compromise. I urge you to join that effort and not to obstruct it.
Your effort to wipe out the adjustment to the hold-harmless provision in Title I, and leave it at 95 percent for three years, will gut the funding that the reforms were trying to secure. It will render the Title I reforms meaningless and sentence African Americans in the rural South to three more years of waiting lists for AIDS drugs and vital services. People in the rural south don't have the tax base or the state resources to survive without federal help in a crisis. Efforts to gut the federal funding in the committee's mark of S. 2823 shows a disturbing misunderstanding for the health care interests of the whole nation and the whole African American community. The CARE Act is a national program, and it's imperative that we fight to make sure it serves all Americans fairly in 2006.
Please reconsider your opposition to the bipartisan consens
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