In Honor of National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day tomorrow, we thought we share this awesome piece from the National Minority AIDS Council. Feel Free to check their website out for more information on their organization and all the amazing things they do: http://www.nmac.org/.
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The infographic
below shows the stark reality of HIV in Black America. The statistics are
mind numbing. At current rates of infection, 50% of black gay men will
have HIV by the time they are 35 (8% of white gay men are infected). I’ve
been accused of caring more for the black community then I do for my own
people. I love being Asian and I will always be concerned about my
community, but the numbers don’t lie. As an Asian gay man, I am fighting
for black gay men because it’s the right thing to do. I am fighting for
black gay men because like the civil rights movement, it’s going to take
a rainbow of people fighting together to make a difference.
February 7
is National Black
AIDS/HIV Awareness Day. We come together to once again
draw attention to HIV’s devastation of America’s black community. How
many more awareness days do we need in order to understand that we’ve
failed black gay men? Nowhere in the world are there communities with
a 50% infection rate. We have also failed African American women when
they are 20 times more likely to be HIV infected then white women.
In the fight against HIV over the last 30 plus years, the statistics for
the black community were always known. The social determinants of health
are often sited as the reason for the big difference. According to the
CDC, "The social determinants of health are the circumstances in
which people are born, grow up, live, work, and age, as well as the
systems put in place to deal with illness. These circumstances are in
turn shaped by a wider set of forces: economics, social policies, and
politics.” America has poor people of all ethnicities, so why aren’t the
rates of poverty equivalent by race? The color of your skin should not
determine your health outcome, yet all the indicators reveal the
opposite.
The HIV community cannot solve all the world’s challenges, so what is our
responsibility? A recent Lancet article notes, “33 percent of
HIV-positive black MSM were retained in care, compared with 51 percent of
white MSM; and only 16 percent of black MSM were virally suppressed,
compared with 34 percent of white MSM. If black MSM achieved the same
degree of HIV care as white MSM, the racial gap in new infection rates would
be reduced by 27 percent. If black MSM with HIV had 95 percent diagnosis,
or 95 percent retention in care, or both, the reduction would be 27
percent, 25 percent, and 59 percent, respectively.”
In other words, if we’re able to retain HIV positive African Americans in
care, we can significantly move the curve. It’s not enough to link people
to care, all PLWH need to be retained in care.
NMAC challenges
health departments and community based organizations to move quickly and
aggressively to link/retain all PLWH into care. Since
it’s not enough just to link into care, we need implementation research
to understand how to retain PLWH in care. AIDS United
published an interesting study on the use of smartphone apps to support
PLWH in care. A panel from the International
Association of Physicians in AIDS Care has 5
recommendations on how to retain PLWH into care. NMAC thinks it may be
time to look at incentive programs for either the PLWH or healthcare
providers.
NMAC challenges
the Centers for Disease Control, health departments, and community to
re-examine the use of data. There is too much lag time
between collecting the data and reporting on it. As a result, decisions
are being made using data sets that can be 4 years old. How helpful is it
to make decisions in 2015 based on data from 2010? This year the White
House will release an update on the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, yet the
data from the report may have been collected years earlier. It’s very
difficult to get a good picture of the epidemic if we don’t have good
data. NMAC asks health departments to create advisory committees made up
of people living with HIV, activists, community based organizations,
elected officials, healthcare providers, civil rights attorneys,
researchers, and others to discuss the use of data. Policies that were
put in place at the beginning of the epidemic may no longer be relevant.
Making good decisions depends on good data. Data should be the foundation
to determine how to spend limited HIV resources.
Viral suppression and when to begin treatment should be the PLWH’s
decision with support from their healthcare provider. Health literacy for
all people living with HIV is essential in order for individuals to make
informed decisions. NMAC
calls for impactful, culturally intelligent health literacy programs to
be made available to all PLWH. Differences in viral
suppression based on race should be closely monitored with timely
transparent reporting. Using viral load data, NMAC recommends that money
and resources are prioritize for “hot spots”, communities with a large
numbers of PLWH who also have a high viral load. The money needs to
follow the epidemic.
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The color of your skin should not
determine your risk for HIV infection, viral load, or mortality. On this
National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, let’s commit to retaining everyone
living with HIV into care.
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ABOUT NMACThe
National Minority AIDS Council (NMAC) builds leadership within communities
of color to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since 1987, NMAC has advanced this
mission through a variety of programs and services, including: a public
policy education program, national and regional training conferences, a
treatment and research program, numerous publications and a website: http://www.nmac.org/.
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