A White House proposal to cut $1.23 billion in fiscal year 2017 from the National Institutes of Health would include slashing $300 million in HIV/AIDS research and support programs.
A worldwide initiative to help people with HIV and AIDS, known as PEPFAR and heavily focused on patient treatment in Africa, would be slashed by almost $300 million under the plan. The savings would be found by slowing the rate of new patients put on treatment and reducing support to “low-performing countries.” States also would face a $50 million cut that would target “less effective HIV research and prevention activities.”
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price is scheduled to appear before the House Committee on Appropriations on Wednesday to talk about the budget proposal for his department, which NIH and and some of the PEPFAR cuts fall under.
The cuts are part of an overall proposal aimed at cutting $18 billion from the federal budget this fiscal year, which ends in October.
The Broadway community will come together once again for Broadway Backwards, an annual celebration of unity, equality and love through gender-reversed performances of classic showtunes.
This 12th annual evening is produced by Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and benefits Broadway Cares and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York City.
The star-studded event features performances of quintessential Broadway tunes with a twist: men sing songs originally intended for women, and vice versa. Artists will perform the great songs of musical theatre while freeing themselves of the bounds of gender norms. It’s a show where gender doesn’t matter, but love does.
This exhilarating evening will include one-of-a-kind, unforgettable performances from celebrated stars of stage and screen including Sierra Boggess, Tony winner Len Cariou, Tony nominee Carolee Carmello, Robert Creighton, Ariana DeBose, Tony Award winner Cynthia Erivo, Tony nominee Santino Fontana, Lora Lee Gayer, Tony winner John Glover, four-time Grammy Award nominee Josh Groban, Tony winner Cady Huffman, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Rachel Bay Jones, Andrew Keenan-Bolger, Tony winner Levi Kreis, Eric Petersen, Tony nominee Andrew Rannells, Megan Sikora, Elizabeth Stanley, Bobby Conte Thornton, two-time Golden Globe winner, Tony nominee and Oscar nominee Kathleen Turner, six-time Emmy Award winner Bruce Vilanch, Rachel York and Jersey Boys original cast members Dominic Nolfi, Michael Longoria and Daniel Reichard.
Creator Robert Bartley will return to direct the show. He will be joined by Mary-Mitchell Campbell as music supervisor and Laura Bergquist as music director. Choreography will be created by Bartley, Christopher Rice and Adam Roberts.
Last year’s inspiring performance raised a record $480,287. It featured a 67-person cast of Broadway and television’s best, backed by a live onstage orchestra.
What began as a small, grassroots concert performed at The Center in 2006 quickly grew into a highly-anticipated event presented in Broadway’s best theatres. In its 11 editions, Broadway Backwards has raised more than $2.8 million for Broadway Cares and The Center.
Monday, March 13, 8 pm Al Hirschfeld Theatre 302 West 45th Street, NYC
By a vote of 9-2, the Utah state House Judiciary Committee has approved new legislation that would require folks to disclose HIV/AIDS status or face criminal penalties.
House Bill 369 now heads to the full House for debate.
LGBT advocates and AIDS support groups worry that such legislation could discourage people from getting tested for HIV. Executive director of the LGBT rights group Equality Utah, Troy Williams worries that enacting statutes like HB369 were “starting down a path toward criminalizing people with HIV.”
But Republicans on the committee say there’s no reason status shouldn’t be disclosed by consenting adults. “To knowingly put another person at risk of harm to their body,” Rep. Kim Coleman, R-West Jordan, said. “Why should that not be a crime?”
At one point, a proposal was put forth that would include disclosing any sexually transmitted disease, but that amendment failed.
At the 2016 HIV Research for Prevention (HIVR4P) Conference this week in Chicago, Illinois, researchers shared the news that a man in the U.S. has acquired a rare strain of HIV despite regularly using Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP).
As many gay men know, PrEP is an HIV prevention strategy that has been touted as 99% effective via the use of a once-a-day pill.
In an interview with TheBody.com, a leading news source for information related to HIV and AIDS, Dr. Howard Grossman says the man is his patient and had been using PrEP since December 2015. The patient came in for routine follow-up testing earlier this year and was discovered to be HIV-positive. When asked why PrEP didn’t work in this case, Dr. Grossman replied that the man had acquired a rare strain of HIV that is resistant to both of the drugs found in Truvada, the only medication that has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for PrEP. This is the second documented case of someone contracting HIV while consistently using PrEP. The first case was announced earlier this year in February.
In a separate interview with The Body, Dr. Robert Grant, an internationally recognized PrEP expert who co-presented on the case, said that he continues to believe PrEP is “at least 99 percent effective” even with these now two cases of PrEP failure. According to Grant, “PrEP is still the most effective tool for HIV prevention we have ever had.”
Even though PrEP has been proven to be safe and highly effective at preventing HIV transmission, it is not foolproof. It only works if you take it exactly as prescribed. Additionally, it’s important to remember that PrEP does not protect against other sexually transmitted infections or unwanted pregnancy. Condoms, birth control and other proven prevention methods can be paired with PrEP to provide additional protection.
Pair a charismatic singer and a pop-y dance track with a new campaign to encourage gay men to talk about HIV and you have a winning formula to help curb the spread of HIV.
Alex Newell, out singer/actor of GLEE fame, teamed up with The Knocks for his new single “Collect My Love.”
Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with Newell to utilize the song and music video to get out the word that gay men should “Start talking. Stop HIV.”
From the CDC:
Start Talking. Stop HIV., a new phase of CDC’s Act Against AIDS initiative, seeks to reduce new HIV infections among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men* by encouraging open discussion about a range of HIV prevention strategies and related sexual health issues between sex partners. Effective partner communication about HIV can reduce HIV transmission by supporting HIV testing, HIV status disclosure, condom use, and the use of medicines to prevent and treat HIV.
The video follows several gay couples, and along the way we see that they all have different ways of stopping the spread of HIV, whether through condom use, PrEP or testing for HIV via home test kits.
The son of a good friend of mine, Aaron Levine, is currently doing a two year stint in the Peace Corps in Swaziland, Africa, working in the Youth in Development program.
I should preface this post by saying working as a member of Peace Corps is no “Club Med.” And, as many of you know, it’s not a money making experience. According to the Peace Corps website, Peace Corps provides each Volunteer with housing and a living stipend that enables them to live in a manner similar to people in their community of service.
That being said, everyone talks about the awesome experiences and growth the program provides to young adults.
In an effort to help leave behind a worthy legacy for years to come, Aaron is working to build a much-needed community kitchen to help feed the children in his area.
The project will cost about $1,500, but Aaron isn’t allowed to fund raise on his own. So, his mother has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help cover the costs of materials to build the community kitchen.
I’ll add that this project isn’t going to win someone a Grammy Award or Academy Award. No one will get famous or rich. In fact, no one will make a dime from what will be a grueling project to complete.
But what will happen is countless children in need will get help. And that is priceless.
Aaron works with schools, community members, community organizations, and Non-Governmental Organizations to provide interventions and education pertaining to healthy living, prevention and mitigation of the effects of HIV/AIDS, life skills, employment skills, and providing basic services for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVCs).
Aaron was attached to Eric Rosenberg High School in Gege in the southern region of Shiselweni last Septmeber, having arrived in the country for training in June 2015. He has been doing work to help the youth of the community empower themselves and make a difference in their lives and their community, but sometimes there are economic barriers that are too much to be overcome by children with no parents or children heading households themselves.
Aaron suggested using a nearby store that was abandoned and unused and refurbishing it instead of making an entirely new structure. They approached the owners, who leased it to them for 300E ($20) a month, which will be offset by the repairs they will make on the structure. Upon a closer examination of the structure, they decided to turn it into a community kitchen for the OVCs in the Eric Rosenberg area of Gege.
The inkundla (community head) of Gege has a list of all of the OVCs in the area, but truly every person under 18 in Swaziland is considered an OVC by the Peace Corps. The spread and affect of HIV/AIDS is felt in every corner of the country by everyone in one way or another. Every child has lost a parent, older relative, or sibling. Every adult takes care of, or provides for in some way, at least one OVC, at least one extra child. This project is a small part of relieving that strain of HIV/AIDS on the community and empowering the youth in their economic, social, and emotional struggles. This project is targeting those OVCs with no parents and no solid source of income or food, and will attempt to provide them with at least one extra meal a day.
There’s a lot more info at the link.
I personally think this is an awesome project. It’s a relatively small amount of money for something that, while labor-intensive, will help this area for years and years to feed vulnerable children.
Handsome Prince Harry, in an effort to raise awareness about knowing your HIV status, took an HIV test via livestream which was shown on the British royal family’s Facebook page.
With over 100,000 people living in with HIV in the UK, the 31 year old ginger has made raising awareness about HIV status a focus of his public work.
“It is amazing how quick it is,” the 31-year-old Harry said during his appointment at a London hospital. The famously red-headed royal added: “So whether you’re a man, woman, gay, straight, black or white — even ginger — why wouldn’t you come an have a test?”
The video hearkened back to groundbreaking images of Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana, reaching out to people with HIV in the 1980s. Diana’s gestures — including a photograph of her shaking hands with an HIV-positive man and hugging children with AIDS — went a long way toward removing the stigma around it.
Australia’s top HIV/AIDS researchers and organizations have declared the AIDS epidemic (not the disease itself) is ‘over.’
As the number of actual AIDS diagnoses have continued to drop to very low numbers, the Australian Federation of AIDS Organizations has pronounced the disease is now seen as beaten in terms of being manageable.
“AIDS is over in the way we knew it,” he said. “We’ve got access to treatment that has had extraordinary effect, and community activism since the very early years of AIDS in the ’80s and ’90s has helped the efforts to fight it.”
Professor Sharon Lewin, director of the Peter Doherty Institute, told the ABC that anti-retroviral medications had been crucial to the epidemic’s decline, allowing people diagnosed with HIV to live healthy, long lives.
“I’ve actually seen a dramatic transformation of HIV from a universal death sentence to now a chronic, manageable disease,” Professor Lewin said.
However, Mr O’Donnell said Australia still has a major challenge in addressing HIV. “We still have a huge task in dealing with the 1100 to 1200 cases of HIV per year,” he said. “These are avoidable infections.”
He said he expected the pre-exposure prophylaxis Truvada, a once-a-day pill taken to prevent HIV, to be a game-changer comparable to the impact of the contraceptive pill.
“We need urgent action from the Australian government to subsidise this pill,” he said, adding that Truvada would see HIV cases halved in a year.
On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report on what would later be understood as the first documented cases of AIDS. The past 35 years tell a story that bends from uncertainty, fear, and loss toward resilience, innovation, and hope.
We’ve learned that stigma and silence don’t just fuel ignorance, they foster transmission and give life to a plague. We’ve seen that testing, treatment, education, and acceptance can not only save and extend lives, but fight the discrimination that halted progress for too long. And we’ve reaffirmed that most American of ideas – that ordinary citizens can speak out, band ourselves together like a breathtaking quilt, and change the course of our communities and our nation for the better.
Over these 35 years, American ingenuity and leadership has shaped the world’s response to this crisis. From the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), we’ve saved millions of lives at home and around the world. My administration implemented our nation’s first comprehensive National HIV/AIDS Strategy, and we’ve updated it through 2020.
We’ve invested in research and evidence-based practices that have given us revolutionary tools like treatment as prevention and pre-exposure prophylaxis. We’ve made critical investments to help eliminate waiting lists for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program. We’ve continued efforts to support the promise of a vaccine. And the Affordable Care Act has resulted in millions of individuals gaining affordable, high-quality health coverage – all without denial for pre-existing conditions like HIV.
While there is more work to do – the economically disadvantaged; gay and bisexual men, especially those who are young and Black; women of color; and transgender women all continue to face huge disparities – I’m confident that if we build upon the steps we’ve taken, we can finish the job.
Nearly five years ago, I said that an AIDS-free generation is within reach, and today, the global community is committed to ending this epidemic by 2030. This will take American leadership, smart investments, and a commitment to ensure that all communities are heard and included as we move forward.
So today, let’s call the names. Let’s remember those we lost too soon. And let’s rededicate ourselves to ending this epidemic once and for all.
HIV/AIDS activists are royally pissed off at Sen. Bernie Sanders after the Sanders team issued a press release suggesting a meeting held between the activists and Sanders focused on his endorsement of a California ballot initiative that could lower prices for tax-payer supported HIV/AIDS treatment and drugs.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday met with national HIV/AIDS advocates to discuss the epidemic and his support for a California ballot initiative to lower prices for taxpayer-supported AIDS treatments.
“Let me thank you for the work you do,” Sanders said at the conclusion of the meeting. “The issues you have raised are enormously important and effect millions of people in this country and more around the world.
“I look forward to continuing to work with you,” the senator added at the meeting hosted by Danny Glover, the activist and actor.
The ballot proposition Sanders supports – the California Drug Price Relief Act – is supported by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and National Nurses United, both headquartered in Oakland, California. The measure would prohibit the state from paying more for a prescription drug than the lowest price paid for the same drug by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It would make sure that state taxpayers will no longer be ripped off by pharmaceutical companies that charge exorbitant prices for AIDS treatments and other prescription drugs. “We think it’s a great start and we applaud the people of California for standing up to the pharmaceutical industry,” Sanders said afterward.
Sanders’ proposal to provide Medicare-for-all universal health care would also benefit the 1.2 million Americans with HIV/AIDS.
At the meeting, Sanders noted that he has introduced a plan to lower costs for HIV/AIDS drugs. His measure would establish a prize fund to provide incentives for drug makers to develop new treatments. Unlike the current system that lets drug makers charge the highest prices in the world for medicine sold in the United States, medical breakthroughs made under the prize fund system would make the new drugs available to the public at affordable prices.
Sanders also agreed to set a national goal of ending the HIV epidemic in the U.S. by the year 2025 so that HIV is no longer a public health threat to any community in the U.S. and that people with HIV are able to live long, healthy lives.
Sanders also has called for expansion of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program which provides HIV-related services. The senator also promised to push for stronger civil rights protections for people living with the disease.
Longtime HIV/AIDS Activist Peter Staley issued this angry statement after the press release from Sanders:
Feeling used and abused by the Sanders campaign right now. They just issued a press release making it sound like our meeting was about his endorsement of AHF’s drug pricing ballot initiative in CA.
Senator Sanders never brought the issue up during our meeting. WE brought it up near the end, only to tell him that we had been flooded with messages from all the leading AIDS organizations in CA with deep concerns about AHF’s initiative — they are worried it could actually negatively impact access to AIDS drugs.
Those groups have tried to reach the campaign with these concerns but had hit a brick wall. We asked Sanders to designate someone in his campaign to talk with these groups, and he agreed to this.
WE DID NOT ENDORSE AHF’S INITIATIVE.
His campaign should not have issued a press release implying this was a major topic of discussion at the meeting, and that there was general agreement on the Senator’s position on this. Anything but.
