Mandy Moore Heads To The Hill To Highlight AIDS Prevention

By Janie Amaya

Singer and actress Mandy Moore joined a group of health panelists on Capitol Hill Thursday to highlight the ongoing achievements in the fight against AIDS in the U.S. and world wide, on World AIDS Day.

U.S. supported programs such as family planning and HIV/AIDS integration services are great contributors in the fight to achieve an AIDS-free generation, according to the Global Health Council.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic broke-out nearly 30 years ago and according to the Global Health Council these prevention programs are efficient, effective and in demand.

As the Ambassador for the non-profit organization Population Services International (PSI), Moore has travelled extensively around the world working to help improve the health and lives of people in developing countries.

Moore said that through her travels, she has been able to see first hand the toll HIV/AIDS takes on families who don’t rely on support systems such as family planning and HIV/AIDS integration services.

“Country-wide in Cameroon, there are 330,000 children who have lost one parent to HIV/AIDS, classifying them as AIDS orphans,” Moore said.

However, according to Moore and the Global AIDS Report, the overall growth of the AIDS epidemic has steadily declined since the late 1990s due to significant antiretroviral therapy over the past few years.
 
“The most recent United Nations AIDS reports on World AIDS Day highlights the fact that eliminating new HIV infections in children is completely within our grasp,” Moore said.

Ugandan physician and panelist Dr. Peter Okaalet said that in a country where family planning was almost a taboo in the past, the latest HIV/AIDS prevention and education efforts begin with teaching the young people.

US To Host Global AIDS Conference In 2012

Travis Martinez - University of New Mexico/Talk Radio News

As the Obama administration prepares to repeal the HIV ban on infected foreigners, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced today that the U.S. will host the biannual global AIDS conference in 2012.

The U.S. last hosted the conference in 1990.

“We have to continue to see a global solution to this global problem,” she said. “It is clear that our nation’s investments in HIV/AIDS are having an impact. President Obama and I are dedicated to enhancing America’s leadership in the fight against global AIDS,” said Clinton.

“The American people can be proud of the work that is taking place, and of the dedicated people who are doing it. Yet it is equally true that the global AIDS emergency is not over,” added the Secretary of State.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the lifting of the HIV ban a consequential shift in U.S. policy.

“It was a policy that tore families apart, kept people from getting tested, forced others to hide their HIV status and forgo live saving medication,” she said.

According to a press release, the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP), is working to develop and implement a National HIV/AIDS strategy which would involve goals to reduce HIV incidence, increase access to care and optimize health care outcomes.

Online Atlas Illustrates HIV/AIDS Prevalence Across The Nation

By Learned Foote - Talk Radio News Service

Today the National Minority Quality Forum launched a Web site featuring a National HIV/AIDS Atlas, a mapping project created with the assistance of the School of Public Health and Health Services at George Washington University.

The atlas, available at http://hivmap.org, maps the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in terms of geography, creating a color-coded map that allows its users to organize the data in terms of age, gender and ethnicity. “If we think of the AIDS pandemic as a global wildfire, then the way that you fight a wildfire is to identify the hot spots, and to put them out,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

The NMQF has created atlases charting diabetes and chronic kidney disease for professional use, but the HIV/AIDS atlas is their first atlas to provide information to the general public. “We felt that every community ought to know its status,” said Dr. Gary A. Puckrein, the President and CEO of the National Minority Quality Forum.

To create the map, the NMQF requested data from the departments of health in every state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and New York City. Twenty-nine of these 54 departments provided information at the county level, and New York City had information detailed enough to compare various zip codes.

The NMQF found that just 20 counties in the U.S. are responsible for fully 40 percent of the country's HIV/AIDS cases. Two hundred counties have 80 percent of the cases. “You wouldn’t have gotten that before the data was sort of pulled together and aggregated that way,” said Puckrein. “That says that we’re dealing with something that’s highly localized.”

The NMQF announced the project from Washington, D.C., where about three percent of current residents have HIV/AIDS. "When you're looking at an atlas of HIV in this country, we are standing on ground zero," Weinstein said.

The NMQF created the atlas partly to provide hard data to assist community-based organizations and advocacy groups. The data is gathered by county lines, but the atlas also provides rough approximations that organize the data according to congressional districts, and the site also provides contact information for U.S. Representatives.

“This is the way you do health care in the 21st century,” said Dr. Puckrein. “Now you actually know where HIV and AIDS are in America.”

The atlas web site launched at 10 a.m. on Monday morning, and according to a spokesperson for the National Minority Quality Forum, received over 17,000 hits in the first six hours.

"South Africa's moral conscience" speaks out on AIDS funding holdup

Speaking on a conference call with reporters, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu known as "South Africa's moral conscience" pleaded that members of the United States Senate vote to triple the bipartisan funding of $50 billion for HIV/AIDS funding in Africa. Tutu believes that the United States has a responsibility to work towards increasing the HIV/AIDS funding and that if it does so "other countries will follow."

Currently, throughout Africa, an estimated 22.5 million people have HIV/AIDS as of 2007 with an additional 1.7 million becoming infected that year alone. Tutu and others in the HIV/AIDS community believe that tripling the funding will increase treatment for 3 million people.

Tutu added that all too often people are unwilling to take a statistic regarding HIV/AIDS and put a face and name to it. "these statistics represent someone's loved one," Tutu added, "if we are able to put a face and name to someone we will recognize that we are talking about people's flesh and blood."

The urgency of Tutu's remarks come as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) as well as 6 social conservative senators are holding up the legislation unless a provision is added that would place a greater emphasis on treatment rather than prevention. Coburn believes “the vast majority of the money is going to get consumed by those wanting to help people with HIV, rather than [by] people with HIV.”