APRIL 18.2009‘(({Notes 5
PERSPECTIVE
K££P fUDS on FROnr BURf1£R, SRYS CDC
New HIVIAIDS awareness campaign to refocus national attention on growing crisis
by Mott Comer. Q-Notes staff
O n April 7, officials from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
and the White House Domestic Policy
Council’s Office on AIDS Policy announced a
new HIV/AIDS communications and aware
ness campaign, the first federally-funded
national HIV prevention program in more
than a decade.
At a cost of $9 million per year for five
years, the Act Against AIDS campaign wUl
bring simple messages of HIV/AIDS preven
tion to communities across the nation, focus
ing on specifically-targeted communities at
the highest risk of contracting HIV, including
African-Americans, Latinos and gay and
bisexual men. The first phase of the new cam
paign will use transit ads, social networking,
posters, websites, TV ads and other mass
mediums to proclaim “Every 9'/2 minutes
someone in the U.S. is infected with HIV”
The CDC says ifis all part of a larger
effort to bring national attention back to the
HIV/AIDS epidemic.
“We are here today to address what we
believe is a serious threat to the health of our
country’ Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the
National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis,
STD, and TB Prevention, said at the April 7
briefing in Washington, D.C.“That threat is
complacency, a false sense of security and a
false sense of calm covering up what remains
a serious epidemic.”
Fenton said overall concern about HIV in
America has declined in recent years.
The Act Against AIDS campaign will reach
out to specific target communities starting
first with African-Americans. He said African-
Americans “bear the greatest burden of
HIV/AIDS.”
According to
Fenton, 1 in 16
black men and 1 in
30 black women
will become infect
ed with HIV in their
lifetimes. Fenton
said working with
gay and bisexual
men of dl races will
also be important as
those populations
“continue to represent the majority of all new
HIV infections.”
The first targeted efforts with African-
American communities will include a leader
ship initiative with 14 of the leading African-
American organizations in the nation, includ
ing the NAACP, the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference,the Coalition of Black
Trade Unionists, Phi Beta Sigma, the National
Urban League, the National Newspaper
Publishers Association and others. The leader
ship initiative will come at a cost of $2 million
per year for five years.
Dr. Richard Wolitski, the acting director of
the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention
told Q-Notes that the phase targeting gay and
bisexual men will start in the summer.
Every 9'A minutes, someone in the U.S. is infected with HIV
“We’ve been working for a number of
months with more than a dozen black gay and
bisexual men from around the country to
develop a phase of the campaign to be initiated
this summer, designed to promote regular HIV
testing among gay and bisexual men,” he said.
Wolitski said that gay, bisexual and MSM
(men who have sex with men) accounted for
53 percent of new HIV infections in 2006.
Among the group, higher infection rates were
seen among African-American MSM.
“The vast majority of men have been tested
at least once, but unfortunately too many men
are not getting tested on a regular basis,” Wolitski
said of the importance of the campaign’s HIV
testing awareness.“The CDC recommends that
sexually active gay and bisexual men be tested
for HIV at least once per year.”
Wolitski said the CDC has also
experimented with effective ways
to reach out to MSM who do not
identify as gay or bisexual. He said
using the internet as an outreach
tool has been one of the most
effective strategies; another is sim
ilar to Metrolina AIDS Project’s D-
UP! campaign.
“One of the intervention pro
grams the CDC disseminates
nationwide is PROMISE, commu
nity level intervention tested with a number of
different risk groups including non-gay-iden-
tified men,” Wolitski said.
“At the same time people assume that gay-
identified men have all the information they
need, that they’ve made all the'changes that
they are going to make,” Wolitski warned. “We
see Campaign on 10
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