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CDC 'numbers game' understates severity of AIDS
George E. Curry/NNPA Columnist
MEXICO CITY - When it comes to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, the federal government has been running a numbers game. That was verified this month when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that it has been underestimating the number of HIV cases each year by 40 percent.
That means instead of 40,000 cases annually - the CDC standard estimate - there were, in fact, 56,300 new infections.
AIDS activists have been saying for years that the CDC understated the extent of the epidemic. But government officials turned a deft ear, haughtily saying they were the experts and community activists, who were closer to the community, did not know what they were talking about.
Phill Wilson, the executive director of the Los Angeles-based Black AIDS Institute, was one of those voices screaming to be heard.
"The CDC's announcement makes me very angry," he said after learning about the new figures. "Had the government listened to the Black AIDS Institute and others - had they respected what we were telling them - there is a possibility that we could have been able to prevent some of these infections."
If the numbers game stopped there, it would be bad enough. But it doesn't. Equally disturbing is the gap in global and domestic spending on AIDS.
"Over the last five years, the White House and Congress have increased spending on HIV prevention, treatment and support programs for low-income countries dramatically - at the same time that domestic spending has remained all but flat," concludes a report by the Black AIDS Institute titled, "Left Behind."
A chart in the report makes the point. In 2005, U.S. spending on AIDS globally increased by 21 percent while domestic spending on AIDS remained unchanged. The following year, global spending increased by 22 percent and domestic spending decreased by.4 percent. In 2007, international spending jumped by 46 percent while domestic spending increased by only 2.5 percent. This year, global spending is expected to increase by 34 percent while domestic spending inches up by 1.2 percent.
"Black communities throughout the United States continue to bear a disproportionate share of the AIDS epidemic," the Left Behind report states. "More than 500,000 Black Americans are living with HIV, and more than 20,000 or more become infected each year. Blacks living with HIV have an age-adjusted death rate more than twice as high as HIV-infected Whites."
Nearly one of every two people living with HIV in the U.S. is Black. AIDS is the leading cause of death among Black women between 25-34 years and the second-leading cause of death in Black men between 35-44 years of age. Black women are 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS than White women.
Blacks make up 70 percent of new HIV diagnoses among teenagers.
Stung by those numbers, the Congressional Black Caucus prodded Congress in 1998 to establish a Minority AIDS Initiative, with the goal of reducing HIV-related racial and ethnic disparities.
"Between 1999 and 2008 federal appropriations for the Minority AIDS Initiative roughly doubled, rising from $199 million to $403 million," the Black AIDS report noted. "During that same period, by contrast, U.S. government funding for global AIDS programs (excluding research) rose 37-fold - from $146 million to $5.5 billion."
The U.S. should be applauded for taking on the leadership role in combating AIDS internationally. But it has a lot more work to do at home.
"While international spending on AIDS by the U.S. government increased by more than 14-fold between 1995 and 2004, HIV-prevention spending rose by a mere 46%, or at rate roughly comparable to the increase in the cost of living."
On August 4, a group of AIDS experts attending the international AIDS convention in Mexico proposed that the U.S. spend $1.3 billion a year to implement a comprehensive national prevention strategy.
"It is outrageous that the U.S. AIDS epidemic, especially the Black epidemic, gets no attention, and that we American citizens have to fight so hard for basic, lifesaving services," said Pernessa Seale, founder and CEO of the Balm in Gilead. ".As the U.S. has chronically neglected its own AIDS epidemic, that the epidemic has continued and grown - a tragedy that is completely unnecessary and that must be reversed."
