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October 2004 At NORA Meeting, HIV Prevention for Youth, Ryan White Reauthorization Discussed On Monday, October 18, the National Organizations Responding to AIDS (NORA) coalition, for which AIDS Action serves as the convener, held its monthly meeting. Titled HIV Prevention and Youth, a Look at the Challenges Facing D.C. and Beyond, the meeting featured a presentation by Adam Tenner, executive director of Metro TeenAIDS, a community-based organization in Washington D.C. During his remarks, Mr. Tenner focused on the specific HIV prevention, education, and treatment needs of young people. Mr. Tenner opened with a discussion of Advancing HIV Prevention (AHP), the initiative that was implemented last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) The initiative stresses four key strategies: 1) Making HIV testing a routine part of medical care; 2) Implementing new models for diagnosing HIV infections outside medical settings; 3) Preventing new infections by working with individuals diagnosed with HIV and their partners; and 4) Further decreasing perinatal HIV transmission. He revealed that he is critical of Advancing HIV Prevention because he believes that it does not adequately account for the prevention needs of youth (which he defines as persons under the age of 24). He pointed out that youth are not mentioned anywhere in the CDC’s materials on AHP and then suggested that the CDC has shifted away from interventions targeted toward young people in response to a larger, Administration-wide mandate that is emphasizing programs with evidence of measurable impact. Continuing, he added that identifying measurable impact can be a challenge when you are talking about HIV prevention because it is much harder to measure what didn’t happen (such as the prevention of an HIV infection) than something that did (such as an increase in transmission rates). According to Mr. Tenner, this led CDC to focus its attention on specific pockets of people who, its data suggest, are experiencing a particularly high rate of HIV transmission—rather than taking a larger, systemic approach to HIV prevention. Mr. Tenner believes that this shift will ultimately result in an increase in HIV infections among populations that CDC is de-emphasizing—including youth. Mr. Tenner’s organization, Metro TeenAIDS, was one of four organizations in the metropolitan Washington area that lost CDC prevention funding in the most recent grant cycle. This has resulted in a loss of $1 million dollars in youth-focused prevention funding for African-American youth in D.C. Mr. Tenner is very concerned about the potential impact of these cuts, especially given that Washington has the highest AIDS incidence rate of any city in the U.S., and half of all new HIV infections nationally occur in people under the age of 25. His organization has been very vocal in expressing its concern over the state of HIV prevention programs for youth, and he encouraged NORA to become more engaged in this issue. Mr. Tenner closed by suggesting that NORA advocate for a comprehensive strategy for adolescent HIV prevention from CDC. This issue will be explored further by the NORA Prevention Working Group. Mr. Tenner’s remarks were followed by a brief presentation from AIDS Action’s Political Director Bill McColl on the status of the Ryan White CARE Act Reauthorization process. Mr. McColl stated that reauthorization must take place by September 30, 2005. Then he provided NORA members with an overview of some activities related to reauthorization that have taken place over the past several months. He also provided attendees with copies of reauthorization principles that have been released by six organizations within the HIV community. He noted that Congress will not actively take up CARE Act reauthorization until its 109th session, which begins in January 2005; nevertheless, some Members have already expressed interest in playing a key part of the process. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA). Mr. McColl further noted that Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), the current chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee—which has jurisdiction over the CARE Act—has indicated that he will be leaving the committee in order to assume the chairmanship of another committee, probably budget. His most likely replacements are Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) or Senator Michael Enzi (R-WY). Mr. McColl encouraged NORA members to become involved in the drafting of the NORA principles for reauthorization. Following Mr. McColl’s remarks, Jim Harvey, a member of the NORA Executive Committee (EC), shared that the EC has begun conversations around reauthorization and will be soliciting input from NORA members in the coming weeks. For more information about NORA, e-mail Jessica Tytel at jtytel@aidsaction.org. |
