Now more than ever: Fighting HIV/AIDS in the black community
A new report released this week by the Black AIDS Institute outlines the promise and the challenge of the current moment in the fight against HIV/AIDS in the black community.
The 2009 State of AIDS in Black America underscores while AIDS activists are hopeful that a new administration will be more supportive of the AIDS fight, years of neglect, at both the governmental and communal level, still continue to have a devastating impact on communities of color.
Some of the key findings in the report:
There has been a lack adequate federal response and funding in dealing with the growing crisis of HIV/AIDS in communities of color and in the South. The Southern AIDS Coalition has called for a "fundamental rethinking of AIDS policy." In 2008, the Black AIDS Institute called for better domestic policies in the United States and for international agencies to hold the U.S. government accountable for failure to address HIV/AIDS epidemic in its own country.
As Kai Wright points out in The Root:
As Wright explains:
The 2009 State of AIDS in Black America underscores while AIDS activists are hopeful that a new administration will be more supportive of the AIDS fight, years of neglect, at both the governmental and communal level, still continue to have a devastating impact on communities of color.
Some of the key findings in the report:
In 2008, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its long-awaited study re-examining the size and depth of the U.S. epidemic, finding that:As Facing South has previously reported, the epidemic among African-Americans in some parts of the United States is as severe as in parts of Africa. AIDS is the leading cause of death among black women between ages 25 and 34. In the South, more adults and youth live with and die from AIDS than elsewhere in the nation, creating a health disaster in the region. The South not only leads the nation in AIDS cases and rates in cities of all sizes, but more than half of the African-Americans living with AIDS and more than half of the new AIDS cases reported among blacks occurred in the South.
• The U.S. epidemic is at least 40 percent larger than previously believed and growing by between 55,000 and 58,000 infections a year;
• The U.S. has never logged fewer than 50,000 new infections a year, contrary to prior belief that we leveled out at 40,000 new infections a year in the mid-1990s;
• Black Americans represented 45 percent of people newly infected in 2006, despite being just 13 percent of the population;
• Blacks continue to represent a far outsized proportion of deaths each year. In 2006, Blacks accounted for just over half of all AIDS deaths.
The federal commitment to all areas of AIDS work--prevention, treatment and research--has all but disappeared, exemplified by:
• The CDC's annual HIV-prevention budget has never topped $800 million--a fraction of what the U.S. spends on the Iraq war in a week;
• The prevention budget has been cut by 20 percent in the past five years, in real dollar terms;
• The CDC spent just under $369 million on Black-specific prevention and research in fiscal year 2008, or 49 percent of the overall budget.
• Between 2004 and 2008, the discretionary domestic AIDS budget remained virtually flat, while global spending increased by more than 20 percent annually.
There has been a lack adequate federal response and funding in dealing with the growing crisis of HIV/AIDS in communities of color and in the South. The Southern AIDS Coalition has called for a "fundamental rethinking of AIDS policy." In 2008, the Black AIDS Institute called for better domestic policies in the United States and for international agencies to hold the U.S. government accountable for failure to address HIV/AIDS epidemic in its own country.
As Kai Wright points out in The Root:
Over the past eight years, America has rested on the AIDS treatment successes of the previous decade, turning its focus solely abroad while assuming a domestic victory it has not yet won. The result, as the Black AIDS Institute outlined in our 2008 report, Left Behind: Black America--A Neglected Priority in the Global Epidemic, is a black epidemic that looks more and more similar to those in places like Kenya. From rural Alabama to densely packed Oakland, California, the black American epidemic's breadth and complexity mirrors that of poor communities throughout sub-Saharan Africa.The 2009 report by the Black AIDS Institute underscores that while the challenges are great, Black America is perhaps better poised to meet them today than ever before. Not only are grassroots and nonprofits making a commitment, but advocates are also calling on the Obama administration and lawmakers to make fighting the disease a priority despite the economic turndown.
As Wright explains:
It will be tempting for policymakers and advocates alike to allow the hard work of realizing the new administration's potential on AIDS to drop in priority, given the overwhelming economic challenges the nation faces. We cannot afford that delay. Like many of the challenges President Obama now faces, the previous administration's neglect of black America's downward spiral into AIDS makes urgent action a dire necessity now.
