Washington Blade - September 26, 2008
Amy Cavanaugh

The D.C. Appleseed Center for Law & Justice released a report this week concluding that although D.C. has made "substantial progress in confronting its HIV/AIDS epidemic" since 2005, the city needs to adopt a more aggressive public awareness campaign to fight the disease.

In its fourth report card since Appleseed began charting D.C.'s HIV/AIDS rate, officials said "efforts will need to be increased, as well as sustained, before the District can expect to see any significant drop in new HIV infections."

"The District must take aggressive action to address the remaining obstacles to rolling back the epidemic," the report says. "We of course welcome Mayor Fenty's call for HIV/AIDS to be his top health priority, but sustained, highly visible government efforts to broadly raise awareness of the severity of the epidemic have been absent and reflect a lack of urgency. HIV/AIDS has not been a consistent, routine part of the government's public conversation."

The criticism follows months of grim news about rising HIV infection rates in the city and reports that D.C. has one of the highest AIDS rates in the country.

During a news conference Wednesday at Metro Teen AIDS, Fenty emphasized the report's grades for District efforts at combating HIV and AIDS. Despite Appleseed's criticism of the D.C. government, Fenty noted that 11 graded areas received improved scores or stayed the same.

"With each and every subsequent report card of how the D.C. government is doing in providing services to people infected or susceptible to HIV," he said, "we're doing a better job."

Dr. Pierre Vigilance, director of the District's health department, also welcomed the report's indications of progress.

"We've made progress since 2006 and our grades are better than ever before," he said. "What we need to realize is that this doesn't belong to one community - it belongs to all of us. We need to work to reduce the stigma of HIV, promote safer routine behaviors, and reduce risky behaviors."

The Appleseed report came the same week the Whitman-Walker Clinic launched Project R.E.D., a new HIV/AIDS education campaign.

"Project R.E.D. developed in response to the new D.C. HIV/AIDS statistics that came out last fall from the D.C. Department of Public Health," said Chip Lewis, the Clinic's deputy communications director.

"We decided to do an aggressive new campaign to promote HIV/AIDS education in the city, with direct grassroots outreach."

The D.C. Department of Health released a report in November 2007 noting that D.C. has a higher rate of newly reported AIDS cases than Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit and Chicago; that the majority of newly reported cases were among residents ages 30-49; and that late testing was a major concern for the District.

Those concerns were echoed in this week's report from Appleseed, which noted that between 1997 and 2006, more than 68 percent of newly identified AIDS cases in D.C. were "late testers," or people who learned of their HIV positive status less than a year before being diagnosed with AIDS.

Patients in the category would likely have tested positive for HIV long before contracting AIDS.

"The city's high late tester rate reveals that too many District residents living with the HIV virus are not aware that they are HIV positive and are potentially infecting others," the report says. "The compelling need for increased HIV testing is plainly evident."

Last month, the federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention released a new estimate of the annual numbers of new HIV infections. According to those findings, approximately 56,300 people are infected each year, an increase from the previous estimate of 40,000.

The federal report also confirmed that gay and bisexual black men were most affected.

Also last month, Whitman-Walker released data showing the number of patients that have tested positive for HIV has risen dramatically. With approximately the same number of patients tested, the number of positive cases rose from 80 in the first half of 2007 to 266 in the first half of 2008 - an increase of 232 percent.

'Prevention and education'

ReGina Newkirk, the Clinic's director of development, said that after seeing the data from the D.C. health department, Whitman-Walker had to rethink their approach to combating HIV/AIDS.

"We looked at what we were doing, and said, 'We're doing all this and rates are still rising? How can we address this differently?'" she said.

"In recent years, federal funding for HIV/AIDS transitioned from prevention and education to testing and care, and a lot of organizations followed suit. We need to get back to prevention and education, and that's what we're doing with Project R.E.D."

Project R.E.D., which Newkirk described as an "edgy, attention-getting campaign," aims to educate people of all ages, races and sexual orientations about HIV. However, it specifically targets four groups: 18-24-year-old men who have sex with men; 24-35-year-old straight, black women; single, non-white men who have sex with men; and straight black men under age 40.

The campaign has three components: Outreach to locations that the target groups frequent, such as gay bars, where on-site education will be provided; a targeted advertising campaign, with print advertisements and public service announcements on broadcast media; and use of incentives that encourage people to get tested.

"The posters that we made to put in men's rooms at gay bars are very in-your-face and aggressive," Lewis said. "We want to get people to change behavior in the heat of the moment."

The campaign will have an official launch party tonight at Town Danceboutique, located at 2009 Eighth St. N.W. In October, advertisements will appear on the sides of Metro buses, inside Metro rail cars and in newspapers. Project R.E.D. also will increase mobile HIV testing.

Weiss said that the testing will focus on the same populations targeted in the ad campaign, as well as sex workers and homeless people, which are considered high-risk groups.

Weiss said the Clinic also is launching couples testing for the first time in conjunction with the campaign.

Project R.E.D. is the result of a joint effort between Whitman-Walker's community relations and community health departments, and the campaign is funded from the Clinic's general budget.

Newkirk said the Clinic has spent about $175,000 on the campaign.

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