AIDS Issues Update: Features:
Underplayed in Vienna, New CDC Report Makes Crucial Link Between HIV and Poverty
Washington, D.C., which is surveyed in the report, has an HIV infection rate of 3 percent.
Finally.
Advocates were thrilled last week to see the CDC release a report that proves what we’ve been saying all along: To combat HIV/AIDS in the U.S., we’ve got to tackle poverty.
“The leading public health agency in the U.S. is officially recognizing this link between poverty and HIV/AIDS,” said Sean Barry, executive director at the New York City AIDS Housing Network, which fights for housing opportunities for low-income people with HIV/AIDS.
“It’s saying: For us to concretely work on HIV, we must address things like homelessness and unstable housing, unequal access to health care, mass incarceration and disproportionate rates of unemployment.”
According to the report, 2.1 percent of heterosexuals living in high-poverty urban areas in the U.S. are infected with HIV. That puts some U.S. cities on par with Haiti (2.2 percent prevalence in adults ages 15-49), Ghana (2.2 percent) and Ethiopia (1.4 percent). The study also concludes that the HIV prevalence rate in some large urban centers has reached the status of a “generalized epidemic,” defined by UNAIDS as a population with an overall HIV prevalence rate of more than one percent.
Significantly, the CDC identifies poverty—not race—as the most important demographic factor in determining whether or not a person will contract HIV. In these poor urban communities there was no large difference in prevalence by race or ethnicity: Prevalence was 2.1 percent for blacks, 2.1 percent for Hispanics, and 1.7 percent for whites.
A tool for policy change?
Now the big question is whether advocates can leverage the analysis to convince politicians to devote more resources to poverty prevention (i.e. housing assistance or job training programs) as a method for stemming urban HIV epidemics.
Advocates are cautious but hopeful.
Domestically as well as internationally, there’s always been tension between funding medical and structural approaches to combating HIV infection. (At the International AIDS Conference last week in Vienna, the release of the poverty study was overshadowed by news about a vaginal gel that can be used to greatly reduce a woman’s chance of contracting the virus.)
“It’s great research,” said Matt Lesieur. As a member of the New York HIV Health and Human Services Planning Council, Lesieur has spent much of his time fighting to ensure that HIV funds are also directed to poverty prevention. “Now we ask: How do we market it to politicians so that they understand it and use it effectively?”
Read the CDC’s press release about the report.
The following cities were cited in the study: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Nassau/Suffolk Counties, Newark, New Haven, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and Washington, D.C.
Your inside source for in-depth activism news is updated daily by Staff Writer, Julie Turkewitz
