Heading back to the U.S.: Thoughts from William Smith of SIECUS

hello everyone -- here's a note below that Bill Smith of SIECUS asked me to post to the blog:

He writes:

"As we pack up and head back to the U.S., advocates, scientists and civil servants from our country working on HIV/AIDS are returning to a place where the empirical face and scope of HIV has changed. While here, our own government released HIV surveillance data confirming that our epidemic is worse than we thought, with 40% more new infections each year than previously estimated. That is 16,300 more Americans who became HIV positive annually.

From a numbers perspective, it is alarming, but the rate of new infections was something experienced by AIDS service organizations across the country during this same time frame. For them, it is confirmation that the constant clarion call for a real investment in stemming the epidemic was warranted and now embarrassingly long overdue.

At the IAC, several sessions focused on the domestic epidemic in the U.S. and many included civil society and government, demonstrating the need for us to work together. Dr. Fenton of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, joined civil society on at least two panels and while holding his own with great aplomb, but nonetheless was subject to our own justified anger and outrage about the scale and lack of a strategic, comprehensive response to our epidemic. One session was even interrupted by advocates in a direct action to illustrate the frustration is palpable.

U.S. advocates are asking for the creation of a National AIDS Strategy (NAS) and it was a recurrent them in the various IAC sessions. The NAS is an important step whose success largely hangs on the details of what such a strategy looks like and the existence of political will to actually get it done. Our previous experiences with such plans do not suggest optimism, but we must insist of our leaders that the present time be different.

My fellow co-chairs of the Federal AIDS Policy Partnership (FAPP), Gene Copello of The AIDS Institute and Paul Kawata of the National Minority AIDS Council, and I have argued elsewhere that the NAS must be part of a broader domestic emergency plan on AIDS that begins at once and is comprehensive not just on talk, but also on money. This must begin first and foremost with prevention where the domestic prevention budget, in real dollars, has shrunk each year since 2001.

The new data has created an immediacy to address our domestic epidemic that is sure to take center stage when the United States Conference on AIDS convenes in Miami on September 18. The Caucus for Evidence-Based Prevention will be there as well, raising our collective voices. We'll see you in Miami."