AIDS: Still a Gay Disease in America

[William769]

Even as we make progress toward legal equality in the United States, gay and bisexual men continue to be marginalized and persecuted around the world. It's not surprising to know we also continue to get short shrift in global AIDS conferences and programmatic priorities. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that, worldwide, fewer than one in 20 gay and bisexual men have access to HIV care, prevention, and treatment. Outside the United States, sex between men accounts for as much as 25 percent of all HIV infections in parts of Latin America, with rates nearly as high in Asia, and not as high in Africa where HIV much more strongly affects heterosexuals.

The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA) in 2010 reported that 77 countries continue to outlaw same-sex relations, including five that impose the death penalty on citizens for being gay (Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen, plus some parts of Nigeria and Somalia). According to George Ayala, executive officer for the Global Forum on MSM and HIV (MSMGF), presentations addressing the HIV pandemic disproportionately affecting gay and bisexual men around the world accounted for a minuscule two percent of the entire program at the Eighteenth International AIDS Conference (called AIDS 2010) in Vienna. "That's pitiful for an epidemic that is largely concentrated around men who have sex with men," said Jim Pickett, advocacy director for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago. "We have to do better."

We also have to do better in addressing HIV/AIDS in gay and bisexual men here in the United States. In August 2010, Duncan Osborne reported in Gay City News that New York City health department data indicate MSM in the city continue to have a very high rate of new HIV infection and efforts to get more HIV-positive men onto treatment may be failing. "Gay and bisexual men in New York City are continuing to get infected as the predominant transmission risk," said M. Monica Sweeney, assistant commissioner of the health department's HIV/AIDS bureau. The bureau reported that in 2008, 1,751 of the 4,022 new HIV-positive diagnoses in the city were gay/bi men, further swelling the ranks of the 106,590 New Yorkers (more than 34,000 of them gay and bi men) living with HIV. As for preventing new infections, Sweeney said, "When it comes to the number of partners and how much sex gay men have, that's not something that can be controlled by government. Those are things that community norms should do."

New York physician and Gay Men's Health Crisis co-founder Larry Mass offered his own take on what GMHC is calling "an urgent priority," the worsening HIV epidemic among gay and bisexual men in New York City. "There is no strong leadership voice out there," said Mass in an interview not far from GMHC's now-former home in Chelsea. "We don't have a Larry Kramer out there."

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/11/aids-still-a-gay-disease-in-america/249242/

Now I think I'll go "grow up".

[xchrom]

1. strong recommend!!! -- nt.

[closeupready]

2. I was talking earlier this week about the failure to finance universal access to HIV treatment

especially in the face of campaigns to widen testing.

Well here is an encouraging story, that Obama wants to expand access to HIV treatment - it's still not enough, but it's something, and credit where credit is due:

>>Obama Says He Will Seek More Money for AIDS Programs
By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — President Obama won plaudits from AIDS groups that have criticized him in the past with his announcement on Thursday that he is seeking additional federal money for efforts to prevent and treat the disease in the United States and globally.

“So make no mistake, we are going to win this fight,” Mr. Obama told an audience of international activists, celebrities and lawmakers of both parties assembled at George Washington University for the annual World AIDS Day, 30 years after the disease was identified. “But this fight is not over — not by a long shot.”

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“This fight is not over — not for the 1.2 million Americans who are living with H.I.V. right now, not for the Americans who are infected every day” or their families, Mr. Obama said. And, he added, “It certainly isn’t over for your president.”

For the domestic fight, Mr. Obama announced that he was committing to seek $15 million more for the Ryan White program supporting H.I.V. medical clinics in the United States and $35 million for state programs providing access to necessary drugs. For global efforts, he set a goal of nearly doubling to six million the number of infected people who will get antiretroviral AIDS drugs through a program that his predecessor, George W. Bush, started...<<

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/politics/obama-says-he-will-seek-more-money-for-aids-programs.html