Obama Breaks (Another) Campaign Promise: on AIDS May 9, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Barack Obama, Health.Tags: act up, AIDS, aids activists, aids czar, aids epidemic, aids funding, aids prevention, aids relief, campaign promise, federal budget, federal funding, global aids, health funding, helath policy, hiv prevention, HIV/AIDS, jeff crowley, malaria, national aids strategy, president obama, public health, roger hollander, syringe exchange, tb, tuberculosis
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Published on Saturday, May 9, 2009 by OneWorld.net
WASHINGTON – U.S. President Barack Obama’s failure to lift a federal funding ban on syringe exchange — a policy that allows intravenous drug users to swap used needles for clean ones — is a blow to AIDS-prevention efforts, says a global health group.
![[AIDS activists rally in support of US President Barack Obama in Washington, DC., last November. President Obama's failure to lift a federal funding ban on syringe exchange -- a policy that allows intravenous drug users to swap used needles for clean ones -- is a blow to AIDS-prevention efforts, says a global health group. (AFP/Paul J. Richards)]](https://i0.wp.com/www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/aidsobama_0.jpg "aidsobama.jpg")
AIDS activists rally in support of US President Barack Obama in Washington, DC., last November. President Obama’s failure to lift a federal funding ban on syringe exchange — a policy that allows intravenous drug users to swap used needles for clean ones — is a blow to AIDS-prevention efforts, says a global health group.(AFP/Paul J. Richards)Although Obama pledged on the campaign trail to overturn the federal ban on funding for syringe exchange, he refrained from doing so in his proposed 2010 budget. “Providing clean syringes is proven to be one of the most effective public health interventions since the polio vaccine,” said Jennifer Flynn, managing director of Health Global Access Project (GAP). “It is clear that it works, but yet, we now have to wait for Congress to act to have the freedom to use every possible resource to make it widely available.” (See Health GAP’s full statement below.)
Overall, U.S. health advocates were extremely disappointed by the health provisions in the president’s 2010 budget, unveiled yesterday. “Our analysis of the information provided by the White House today show that the president’s FY10 global health budget essentially flat-lines support for global health and ignores the president’s campaign promises to fully fund PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and to provide a fair-share contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB [tuberculosis], and Malaria,” said Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance. “This proposal is even worse than we had feared,” added Christine Lubinski, director of the Center for Global Health Policy. “With this spending request, Obama has broken his campaign promise to provide 1 billion dollars a year in new money for global AIDS, and he has overlooked the growing threat of tuberculosis.”
Just after Obama’s election, AIDS activists spoke of high hopes for a renewed U.S. commitment to fighting the disease. Last month, however, a U.S. health care foundation said Obama’s first official plan to fight domestic HIV/AIDS “falls far short” of what is needed to confront the growing epidemic. The $45 million media campaign, launched in early April, aims to raise awareness about domestic HIV/AIDS over the next five years. “If this proposal is any indication of how President Obama and his Administration intend to address the AIDS epidemic domestically or globally, we are deeply disappointed,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
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PRESIDENT BREAKS ANOTHER CAMPAIGN PROMISE
From: Health Global Access Project (GAP)
Federal Ban on Funding for Syringe Exchange Remains in Budget
Washington, DC — President Obama’s budget does not follow through on one of his key campaign commitments – to lift the ban on federal funding for syringe access. Before and since taking office, President Obama has repeatedly asserted his support for syringe exchange programs. This latest disappointment comes on the heels of a newly announced six-year global health initiative that would actually reduce spending on global AIDS by $6.6 billion.
“Providing clean syringes is proven to be one of the most effective public health interventions since the polio vaccine. It is clear that it works, but yet, we now have to wait for Congress to act to have the freedom to use every possible resource to make it widely available,” said Jennifer Flynn, Managing Director of Health GAP. Flynn lost a family member in 2005 to hepatitis C contracted from sharing used syringes. “If needle exchange programs were around when my cousin was injecting heroin, he would be alive today. President Obama could have done something simple to save lives. Now Congress needs to take action,” she continued.
Jeff Crowley, national AIDS czar, said that the “President doesn’t think policy should be done in the budget process.” However, the federal ban on funding syringe exchange is housed in each annual appropriations bill, and must be removed from there to allow federal funds to go to these lifesaving programs. Removing the language would allow syringe exchange to be included in the HIV prevention toolkit, and as a result, HIV infections would be reduced. Crowley continued to say that syringe access will be discussed during the National AIDS Strategy. When asked for the time frame of this plan, he said that they are working on it as we speak and did not commit to a final due date. “When you are dealing with the containing the spread of a deadly virus, and you know something works, you don’t need to wait for a “strategy” as well. Taking your time to develop a National AIDS Strategy is no excuse for NOT implementing lifesaving public policy now. Furthermore by NOT taking action, President Obama did set policy on this issue. The right thing to do is to remove the ban in the budget so that we can discuss using federal funds for this lifesaving program,” said Kaytee Riek, Director of Organizing for Health GAP.
The federal ban on syringe access does not formally apply to programs outside of the United States, but under the previous administration, the ban became policy for foreign aid funding as well. That has meant that countries receiving funding from US-supported programs fighting AIDS could not use it to pay for syringe access programs.
“It is sad that my President broke his campaign promise by leaving the funding ban in the budget. Congress must now act and lift the funding ban when they take up the budget next week.” said Jose DeMarco, Health GAP Board member, long-time member of ACT UP Philadelphia and founder of Proyecto Sol Filadelphia.
roger hollander 
After 30 Years of AIDS, Treatment Gap Still Feeds the Epidemic August 20, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Health, Race.Tags: AIDS, aids epidemic, aids prevention, aids research, aids treatment, aids vaccine, capitalism, hiv, hiv infections, HIV/AIDS, julianne hing, roger hollander
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Roger’s note: when I make the point that virtually all social evils, from poverty to war to homelessness, etc., can be traced to capitalist economic relations, to put it mildly, I get funny looks. But I stand by the assertion. We have the tools to eradicate hunger, to end the AIDS epidemic, to provide clean water and adequate housing to every soul on earth. I am constantly told the problem is “human nature.” To that I say, “bullshit!” The problem is the humongous concentrations of wealth and monopoly of resources that are the consequences of capitalist economic relations; and the problem is getting worse, not better. It is in the very nature of capitalist economic relations to reproduce, like a cancer, its malignancy. The rich get rich, the poor get poorer. The sick get sicker.
But according to the organization, an estimated 34 million people are living with HIV and nearly 30 million have died because of AIDS-related illnesses since the discovery of AIDS on June 5, 1981.
Today, with new advances in research, the most pressing issue for the communities that are seeing the fastest rates of new infection—that is, women and in the U.S., black neighborhoods—is equal access to treatment that can not only slow the rate of the virus’s growth in a person’s body but the spread of the disease to other people.
As Rod McCullom reported back in May, when the medical world reported the encouraging results of HPTN 052, which confirmed that early treatment could help curb the rate of HIV transmission:
“Access to treatment will transform the AIDS response in the next decade. We must invest in accelerating access and finding new treatment options,” said Michel Sidibé, the executive director of UNAIDS. “Antiretroviral therapy is a bigger game-changer than ever before—it not only stops people from dying, but also prevents transmission of HIV to women, men and children.”
Indeed, as Phil Wilson, the president of the Black AIDS Institute told McCullom: “We have the tools to end the AIDS epidemic.”
“The question is whether we have the political will and compassion to make the investment necessary to use them.”
Julianne Hing is a reporter and blogger for Colorines.com covering immigration, education, criminal justice, and occasionally fashion and pop culture. In 2009 Julianne was the recipient of USC Annenberg’s Institute for Justice and Journalism fellowship, which funded a reporting project on the impacts of criminal deportation on immigrant families. She has covered police brutality issues from Oakland to New Orleans and in the summer of 2010 reported for Colorlines from the courtroom where Oscar Grant’s killer, BART cop Johannes Mehserle, faced trial. Julianne became politically active in high school, and started organizing students in college around access and affordability issues. She earned her B.A. in social ecology at the University of California, Irvine, where she edited Jaded magazine, named 2007 Publication of the Year by Campus Progress. Julianne’s writing has appeared on AlterNet, Truthout, Hyphen Magazine’s blog, The American Prospect’s blog TAPPED and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog at The Atlantic, Racialicious, The Root and New America Media.
Julianne tweets at @juliannehing.