National HIV/AIDS Strategy Announced

The United States government under George W. Bush engaged in some disastrous behavior, much of which led to the loss of life and engagement in conflict that will last a lifetime. But there is one thing that Mr. Bush did that he should be applauded for, his effort to support HIV/AIDS relief in Africa. Then President-Elect Obama even applauded the outgoing Bush on his efforts during a ceremony hosted by Pastor Rick Warren in December 2008, “I salute President Bush for his leadership in crafting a plan for AIDS relief in Africa and backing it up with funding dedicated to saving lives and preventing the spread of the disease.” During his tenure, President Bush allocated over $100 billion in funding to provide anti-retroviral medication to over 2 million people infected with HIV, mostly in Africa, through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief. While his commitment to providing this much needed drug therapy in Africa should be applauded, there was a crisis of a domestic nature happening that wasn’t addressed in this initiative.

President Obama has just announced his national strategy for fighting HIV/AIDS with a plan to cut infection rates by 25% in five years by shifting current funding to help gay and African American men, a group that has been reclassified as the highest risk group of contracting this disease. Below is an article outlining the plan. But just to give you a summary:

• 1.1 million Americans are living with HIV, 56,000 are newly diagnosed each year
• President Obama’s plan, considered the nations “most sweeping national strategy ever,” calls for a 25% reduction in infection rates in 5 years
• Gay or bisexual men and African American men are two highest risk groups for HIV. More than half of all transmissions stem from male-to-male sexual contact.
• African Americans are 7x more likely to contract the disease as other races.
• $30mil of the funding appropriated under the new healthcare reform law will go towards this new strategy.

Check out the article:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2010%2F07%2F13%2FMN231EDQA5.DTL

This was one of the President’s campaign promises that he is attempting to keep. Does this effort go far enough to address this issue? He is reallocating current funding and adding $30 million from the funding for healthcare reform. Besides that, there is no new funding for this initiative. New money is hard to come by these days and this effort would have likely been stalled in Congress if it required new money. But is this enough? With the stats mentioned in this article, will this effort be enough to save lives and provide care to help the number of people domestically that Bush’s plan was able to help abroad?

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