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Our View – U.S. blacks shorted with global AIDS funding

Why in the world should HIV/AIDS in other countries and racial policy in the U.S. occupy space in the same sentence? For that matter why should any correct-minded human try to stretch a connection between a pandemic and a presidential library?

Literally a heartbeat before the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City last month, Pres. George W. Bush signed legislation reauthorizing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

The $48 billion, five-year PEPFAR package for treating and preventing AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis abroad seems like an altruistic act of grand proportions at first glance, given that UNAIDS estimates approximately 33 million people globally are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, and more than two million die of it each year.

Upon a second peek it amounts to Bush trying to polish a tarnished legacy for display in the international window without fixing the broken panes at home.

The same day Bush signed the law, the Los Angeles-based Black AIDS Institute reported to The New York Times that in the U.S., “Nearly 600,000 African-Americans are living with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and up to 30,000 are becoming infected each year.”

The report added that, after age adjustments, the death rate among blacks is two-and-a-half times the death rate of infected whites.

The article entitled “U.S. Blacks, if a Nation, Would Rank High on AIDS” pointed out that if blacks in the U.S. were a separate country, they would “rank 16th in the world in the number of people living with the AIDS virus…,” and that, “the hypothetical nation of black America would rank below 104 other countries in life expectancy.”

But the government forgot to provide that information to the United Nations before the presentation was made in Mexico City.

The Centers for Disease Control, which tracks figures for the U.S. epidemic, claimed to have sent the data to the Department of Health and Human Services, but the numbers never reached the conference.

Alarms should be screaming if more black Americans are living with the AIDS virus than 7 of the 15 target countries receiving help through PEPFAR, including Botswana, Haiti, Vietnam, Guyana, Ethiopia, Namibia and Rwanda. The report states that “half of all Americans infected with AIDS are black.”

The government estimates that 2 percent of the adult black American population is infected. The CDC’s threshold for defining a “generalized” epidemic is 1 percent, according to the Washington Post. That would place only four sub-Saharan countries with higher infection rates than American blacks.

Kevin Fenton of the CDC told the Post, “The proportion of HIV/AIDS prevention funding devoted to the [U.S.] black community has increased as the epidemic has become more concentrated and now totals about $300 million….”

Are we missing something? While we certainly have a global responsibility and are the largest contributor to combating AIDS in other countries, we’re still talking millions at home versus billions abroad?

The fact that Bush put pen to paper only four days prior to the start of the AIDS conference signals a sad attempt to clean up his image to have something humanitarian or cathartic to display in the George W. Bush Presidential Library in a few years. It’s well known that HIV/AIDS is a political cause du jour for image enhancement.

As Rev. Al Sharpton told MSNBC about the Black AIDS Institute’s report, “U.S. policy makers seem to be much more interested in the epidemic in Botswana than the epidemic in Louisiana. This is an unnecessary and deadly choice. Both need urgent attention.”

Time is running out for positive spin on this presidency and Bush should be attending to domestic issues to improve his credibility.

Ignoring the needs of U.S. minorities to fight this dreadful disease in order to augment a sullied reputation won’t put books on the library shelf or attract visitors.

This is the first in a three-part editorial series on HIV/AIDS.

 

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1 Comment

  1. Bush could not have signed the law unless congress (controlled by Democrats) had passed it. He only has 10 days to sign a piece of legislation before it becomes law anyway. If he hadn’t signed it, would the author (whose name is not listed) be just as critical?

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