Washington Blade - February 6, 2009
C. Virginia Fields

This is the first time that any administration has adopted this kind of goal. As we celebrate National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day on Feb. 7, this development offers a glimmer of hope for those of us who have agonized for so long about the impact HIV and AIDS.

The tragedy of AIDS has been especially profound for people of color - and so has the irony of the United States' AIDS policy. Africa has been severely impacted by AIDS. The Bush administration got a lot of credit, and rightly so, for the assistance it gave to Africa under the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). But the irony is that while PEPFAR requires that foreign countries that get assistance have a national strategy for fighting AIDS, our own federal government does not have such a strategy. We have yet to attack AIDS domestically with the same sense of urgency with which we attack it overseas.

And it's not as if the problems are not as bad here. As the Black AIDS Institute found in a report released last summer, if black Americans were a separate country, they would be the world's 35th most populous country, but would rank 16th in people living with HIV. More people are living with HIV in black America than seven of 15 countries targeted for assistance by PEPFAR, the report found.

HONORARY DAYS ARE often trivial, but National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day gives us the chance to focus attention on the work that remains to be done to end the AIDS epidemic. A crucial goal is a national AIDS strategy - something the group I head, the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS has advocated for a long time (along with many other groups).

NBLCA convened a conclave in 2007 to develop a model strategy. Out of this conclave came the National HIV/AIDS Elimination Act. Among other measures, the act calls for the president and Congress to declare the HIV/AIDS crisis in the African-American community a "public health emergency" and to formulate a domestic plan of action to allocate resources to address the emergency.

We applaud the actions of the Obama administration, and we must continue to be dedicated to making a National AIDS Strategy a reality. Action is needed right now. A report released in August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated 56,300 new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2006 - much higher than the previous annual estimates of 40,000 new infections. While this is alarming for all Americans, it is stunning for minorities. Black Americans, for instance, were seven times more likely than whites to become newly infected with HIV. Blacks are one in eight Americans, but approximately half the people living with HIV in the U.S., according to the CDC.

SADLY, THE NATION'S capital is a leader when it comes to our most vulnerable residents with this illness. Washington accounted for 9 percent of all pediatric AIDS cases in the United States in 2005, according to the D.C. Department of Health report. Between 2001 and 2006, there were 56 children ages 13 or younger diagnosed with either HIV or AIDS in the District.

Various reports have shown that the District of Columbia has the highest rate of AIDS among African Americans of any major city in the country, 277.5 for every 100,000 people. The District's HIV infection rate is higher even than Port-au-Prince, the capital of the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

On Thursday, I gave an address on the State of AIDS in Black America, and I urged everyone to get involved. One thing we must do is insist that Congress pass the AIDS Elimination Act, and that we equally continue to be involved and engaged in the process after the act is passed to make sure that it is enforced and administered properly.

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C. Virginia Fields is president and CEO of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS. She can be reached via nblca.org.

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