Obama en su promesa de campaña reaccionan los líderes...
Making good on a promise President Barack Obama made on the 2008 campaign trail, the White House on Tuesday unveiled the much-anticipated National HIV/AIDS Strategy.
Melody Barnes, director of the White House domestic policy council, told advocates and reporters that 30 years had passed since the epidemic first hit the nation and 20 years had elapsed since the Ryan White CARE Act was first passed by Congress, yet 56,000 people still contract HIV every year in the U.S. and a new person is infected every 9.5 minutes.
“At this important marker in our history, we think it is imperative that we refocus our attention on the issue of HIV and AIDS and what we have to do in the United Sates to address this issue appropriately,” said Barnes.
The plan will be fueled by $30 million that the Department of Health is redirecting from the newly passed health care bill’s prevention fund in order to accomplish three goals: reducing the number of new infections, increasing access to care and creating better health outcomes for people living with AIDS, and reducing HIV-related health disparities among different groups of people.
While health advocates welcomed the new domestic emphasis on the issue and hoped it would produce better coordination among the nation’s agencies and advocacy organizations, many worried that the effort wasn’t ambitious enough and was being underfunded from the outset.
One of the main goals of the strategy is to reduce new infections by 25% by 2015. But Christine Campbell, vice president of advocacy for the New York-based group Housing Works said the goal would take new infections from about 56,300 per year today to 42,225, which wouldn’t even match the 40,000 per year infection rate the country stood at three years ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“So we really don’t believe it's an ambitious enough target for us to go back to where we were three years ago,” said Campbell.
Advocate.com/ July 13, 2010/Kerry Eleveld
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