The US South: Policy Failures Fuel HIV/AIDS Among Women and People of Color

World AIDS Day may be just behind us, but the battle to combat the epidemic marches on. And believe it or not, one of the places it marches on most ferociously is in the US South, where women and communities of color are increasingly affected by HIV/AIDS.

"Forty-six percent of all new AIDS cases come out of the South," says Patricia Eng, Vice President of Program at the Ms. Foundation for Women, "and of the 10 states with the highest number of women with HIV, seven of them are in the South." Southern communities of color have also been particularly hard hit: as a recent Human Rights Watch report notes,

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SMART Leader Wins Prestigious Community Health Award

Great news to share! Susan Rodriguez, president and founding director of long-time Ms. Foundation grantee SMART (Sisterhood Mobilized for AIDS/HIV Research & Treatment) has been chosen to receive the 2010 Community Health Leaders Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation!

This prestigious national award honors 10 individuals who have worked—often at great personal or professional risk—to improve the health and quality of life for vulnerable men, women and children in underserved communities across the United States. Each honoree receives $125,000 to support their ongoing work, as well as the chance to network and collaborate with other leaders from around the country.

Since its founding in 1998, Susan has helped grow SMART into a force to be reckoned with in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The organization is now New York City’s premiere HIV treatment education program run by and for women living with the disease, providing education, information and critical support networks to the many women in New York who continue to battle this disease.

We couldn’t be prouder of Susan, or happier for SMART that she's won this award. It's recognition well-deserved.

Congratulations, Susan!

For more information on how SMART is helping women in New York City face HIV/AIDS, watch the moving video below, featured in the Voices From the Field section of our website.

This Week: Get Yourself Tested!

Sunday, June 27th is National HIV Testing Day, and all this week around the country, cities are offering opportunities and events to help people get tested while learning more about the prevalence of HIV in America and its impact on our communities.

If it feels likes HIV/AIDS is a thing of the past, think again. A few facts on the virus:

• Over one million Americans are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS
• Every 9½ minutes, someone in the U.S. is infected with HIV
• One out of five Americans living with HIV today doesn’t know it
• The epidemic continues to have a disproportionate impact on certain populations, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, gay and bisexual men -- and women
  

The degree to which HIV has become a women's issue in the 21st century cannot be understated. Today women account for more than 27 percent of new HIV cases. Women of color are disproportionately affected at alarming rates: while Black women and Latinas compose 25 percent of women in the US, they represent 81 percent of AIDS diagnoses among women. In 2004, the last year for which data is available, HIV/AIDS was the leading cause of death among Black women aged 25-34.

These statistics make it clear just how big a stake the women's community has in making HIV/AIDS truly a thing of the past. Learn more about how our National Women and AIDS Collective is working to raise awareness and change attitudes about how the virus affects women. Watch Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's video message below about the importance of knowing your HIV status. And please take the time this week to go and get yourself tested -- because knowledge is power.

Ms. Foundation and National Women and AIDS Collective Submit Recommendations to Office of National AIDS Policy

This month, fourteen U.S. organizations working on issues related to human rights, women and HIV/AIDS, including the Ms. Foundation for Women and the National Women and AIDS Collective (NWAC), a project housed at the Ms. Foundation, submitted a series of policy recommendations to guide the Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP) and related agencies in their efforts to achieve better outcomes for women living with and affected by HIV.

Since 1996, the Ms. Foundation has been supporting HIV positive women at the grassroots level to advocate for policies that address their unique and often unment needs. Desiree Flores, Ms. Foundation Program Officer, says, "These advocates have done crucial work in their communities, and we're especially proud of the role they are now playing in bringing these local experiences to bear on policy advocacy at the national level. As they often say, 'If you want to end AIDS now, ask a woman how.'"

Let's hope this administration is all ears.

The policy recommendations are part of a newly released report, Critical Issues for Women and HIV: Health Policy and the Development of a National AIDS Strategy [pdf], which calls attention to the factors contributing to disproportionate rates of HIV among low-income women and women of color, as well as poor health outcomes for women living with HIV, and proposes concrete solutions that integrate prevention and delivery of care. The group identified six key areas of focus for better policy and practices:

• Meaningful involvement by HIV-positive women in development of policy and monitoring and evaluation of programs;


• Greater consideration of HIV-positive people’s civil and human rights;


• Health disparities in the U.S. South and rural areas;


• Health care access;


• Integration of sexual and reproductive health services with HIV testing, prevention and care; and


• HIV prevention.

“Involving the expertise of HIV-positive people and those working on the frontlines of service delivery is critical to improve prevention and care outcomes for communities impacted by HIV. We must use a human rights framework as we reform health policy and develop a National AIDS Strategy that will truly reduce HIV incidence and increase access to care for women,” said Naina Khanna, a member of the NWAC leadership team and recipient of a 2009 Ms. Foundation Woman of Vision Award. Naina Khanna is Coordinator of the U.S. Positive Women's Network and Director of Policy and Community Organizing at Women Organized to Respond to Life-threatening Disease (WORLD), a Ms. Foundation grantee.

In addition to the Ms. Foundation and NWAC, the report signers include several current and former Ms. Foundation grantees: African Services Committee, New York, NY; HIV Law Project, New York, NY; Sisterhood Mobilized for AIDS/HIV Research and Treatment (SMART), New York, NY; the U.S. Positive Women's Network, a project of WORLD, Oakland, CA; and The Women's Collective, Washington, DC.

Representatives from the fourteen organizations plan to meet with Jeff Crowley, Director of ONAP, and other key White House officials in the upcoming months to discuss their recommendations and the development of a national AIDS strategy. In fact, NWAC representatives have already had initial meetings with Mr. Crowley to provide him with concrete, tangible recommendations for including women as a priority population for outreach.

Download Critical Issues for Women and HIV: Health Policy and the Development of a National AIDS Strategy [pdf]

AIDS at Home: Revised Stats Signal Need for Revised Strategy

On Saturday, the Center for Disease Control released a long-awaited report on HIV incidence in the nation. The message it carried was far from good: since the mid-nineties, they’ve severely underreported the number of new HIV infections occurring each year.

The revised annual infection rate is 40 percent higher than previous data suggested. The CDC says it has under-counted the number of new HIV infections by approximately 15,000 people a year, meaning that around 225,000 more people than originally thought are living with HIV. The previous estimate was around 1 to 1.1. million.

While the sheer magnitude of the discrepancy is shocking, its existence is not. As we’ve mentioned before, community-based organizations led by women living with and affected by HIV/AIDS have been calling on the CDC to improve the way in which it tracks new HIV infections and others—from activists to epidemiologists—have criticized the outdated, poorly configured system for years.

The CDC’s surveillance system, which tracks reporting of new HIV cases, hasn’t been changed in more than two decades, leaving many at risk populations under-counted and under-served. This is especially true for women, who frequently acquire HIV differently from men [PDF] and have seen their infection rates rise exponentially since the early years of the epidemic.

CDC surveillance simply isn’t designed to capture how and why more than 50 percent of women get HIV, with grave implications for how prevention programs are designed and funded to address their needs. In fact, because they aren’t thought to be “at risk,” women are sometimes turned away from federally funded testing sites.

The most recent revelation, then, of the underreporting of new HIV cases, is just the tip of the iceberg. Still, it does underscore the urgent need for a much more cohesive, reality-based, well-funded U.S. AIDS strategy.

As the Black AIDS Institute drove home last week in the release of a new report, the current U.S. Administration’s AIDS policy has focused more on combating the epidemic outside the U.S. than within it. This willful neglect has taken a particularly ruthless toll on people of color, especially African Americans.

The Institute’s research starkly reveals how HIV/AIDS rates among certain populations in the U.S. compare to those in developing countries—and consequently, why they should be causing nearly as much alarm:

• If African Americans represented a country unto themselves, it would rank 16th in the world in the number of people living with the AIDS virus.
  


• More African Americans were living with the AIDS virus than the infected populations in Botswana, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Namibia, Rwanda or Vietnam—seven of the 15 countries that receive support from the Administration’s anti-AIDS program.

Let’s also not forget that today, despite extraordinary improvements in HIV treatment, AIDS is the leading cause of death among African American women between the ages of 25-34 and the second leading cause of death among African American men between the ages of 35-44.

Clearly, from failing to accurately assess the hard numbers and true scope of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, to lacking a national strategy grounded in today’s reality to address it—we're faced with a broken system. What’s needed, our Women and AIDS Fund grantees continue to say, is a strategic overhaul that puts affected communities’ unique experiences and leadership squarely at the center of policymaking decisions, and their specific needs at the very heart of treatment and prevention.

Let’s hope the next Administration gets it right.