Endorse Prevention Recommendations for the National HIV/AIDS Strategy

This week, 34 national leaders in HIV programming and policy sent a letter to President Obama with recommendations for core points essential to creating a Strategy that will advance our nation’s HIV prevention response and lead to lower HIV incidence rates.

The Coalition is inviting individual and organizational endorsements to the letter, which can be downloaded here, or read at the end of this message if you click "continue reading."

The recommendations were developed through an independent strategy meeting sponsored by the Coalition for a National AIDS Strategy this October. The meeting was coordinated by amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), with the help of a dedicated planning committee, and hosted by Johns Hopkins University.

The Coalition is organizing three other independent consultations on aspects of the Strategy: care, disparities and research.

The letter explains:

As you know, HIV/AIDS remains a public health emergency in the United States. There is a new HIV infection every 9 ½ minutes, half of people living with HIV/AIDS are not in care, and there are disturbing and persistent gender, racial, ethnic, and geographic disparities in HIV infection rates and treatment access.

Despite these challenges, we have ample evidence that HIV prevention strategies are effective and have already averted hundreds of thousands of HIV infections in the US.  With your leadership and commitment to implement a new, coordinated plan of action, a dramatic reduction in HIV infections in the U.S. is possible…

Without concrete changes in our nation’s approach, there is the very real danger that HIV prevention efforts will actually deteriorate in the coming years, leading to increasing HIV incidence.

Severe cutbacks in state budgets have already undercut health promotion programming across the country.  We need a much more strategic, accountable and better-funded federal HIV prevention enterprise than we have had to date, as well as your ongoing, personal leadership to demand improved outcomes from public and private programming.

The deadline for endorsements is January 10, 2010. Click here to endorse the letter.

The Coalition is also interested in collecting and passing on additional comments on the letter.

Please send in comments on any issue that you feel is underemphasized or missing from the letter, or additional details on areas of the letter you support. The Coalition will compile and summarize this information in a letter, and also send your full comments, to the President.

To send in additional items or comments, please email info@nationalaidsstrategy.org and put “Prevention Letter” in the subject line.  Please send your comments by December 22^nd. Again, please be sure to put “Prevention Letter” in the subject line.