A renewed urgency in AIDS prevention
FOUR MONTHS ago, Gary Daffin, executive director of Boston's Multicultural AIDS Coalition, told me he appreciated the attempt by NAACP chairman Julian Bond to make HIV/AIDS a national priority. Now, with the election of Deval Patrick as governor of Massachusetts, he hopes the state will be a model of urgency.
"I have to say, and I'm kind of laughing because Deval's campaign was a ray of hope for people in the state because he reached a lot of people who hadn't been reached before and got them involved in politics for the first time," Daffin said this week. "The kind of campaign to reduce the stigma of HIV and AIDS has to be a neighborhood-by-neighborhood campaign. It can't be done by flashy commercials. The people we need to reach are the most desperate.
"They aren't the ones sitting home watching television or reading newspapers to see what Jesse Jackson or Barack Obama have to say. If I could take Deval's fantastic field operation, translate that energy and make it a fantastic field operation to reduce the stigma, that would be the most important thing."
Waging a neighborhood-by-neighborhood campaign against the spread of HIV/AIDS has been difficult in recent years as the Romney administration slashed AIDS funding from a high of $51 million in 2001 to about $36 million. AIDS and HIV testing funds were slashed in Romney's spending freeze last month.
According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the number of people in the state with HIV/AIDS has increased by 30 percent from 1999 to 2005, to about 16,000. Yet funding has decreased by about 30 percent. There may be another 8,000 people who either have not reported having the virus or disease or do not yet know they have it.
Daffin last week urged the Patrick transition team at a healthcare hearing to better fund AIDS efforts. Similarly, the National Minority AIDS Council last month appealed to the new Democratic majority in Congress to urgently attack AIDS. When Patrick was assistant attorney general for civil rights, the Justice Department won a landmark settlement for a man who was denied dental treatment for being HIV-positive.
"We've lost capacity in HIV testing," Daffin said. "We haven't had new messages, new communications, new brochures, or new campaigns in the state in five years in the up-to-date language that people understand. AIDS has fallen off the radar a bit because people think that just because there are new medications and people are living longer, that it's become just another chronic disease. There are people being born who need information."
Daffin's lament is being echoed all over the nation. Last weekend, a renewal of federal AIDS programs under the Ryan White act finally passed Congress after bitter turf battles over the $2 billion, which has been flat funded under the Bush administration. Last year, a National Academies Institute of Medicine committee on public financing for HIV/AIDS recommended that the nation move to a new, $7 billion federal program administered by the states to help low-income patients access proper care.
"To possess tools that extend life, reduce illness and reduce disability, while not making them available to those that need them, is, in the committee's view, indefensible," the committee said.
The response of both the Bush and Romney administrations have been indefensible with flat federal funding and state cuts.
Daffin, 43, said the stigma remains so powerful that successes in reducing transmission could easily be overturned. He says he hears over and over how many African-American men do not get tested simply because they don't want to know and the fear that people will think they are gay.
"I know African-American men who are gay and bisexual who are professional, well-educated men who became infected in the last year," Daffin said. "That has been sad and surprising . . . I know someone who has worked in the field of HIV for at least five or six years, and this person had another family member that he took to get tested for HIV. He took the family member to get tested, all the while living with HIV himself but unable to disclose that to anybody in his own family, even though he worries about his own children and their need to be tested as well. To me that is a good example of what we face in the community, when people who are out there working on HIV have a hard time disclosing their status with family and co-workers."
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
