Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - Thursday, October 29, 1998
Louis Freedberg, Chronicle Washington Bureau
The purpose of the program is to give minorities access to the same level of treatment available to white males, for whom the incidence of the disease has declined dramatically.
"AIDS is now hitting hardest in areas where knowledge about the disease is scarce and poverty is high," said Clinton, at a White House ceremony attended by Representative Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus. "In other words, as so often happens, it is picking on the most vulnerable among us."
Clinton cited the spread of AIDS among minorities: African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population and 43 percent of all new AIDS cases; Latinos represent 14 percent of the U.S. population and 22 percent of new AIDS cases.
The money will be used to bolster several government AIDS assistance programs that serve minorities. Some of the new funds will be used to pay for "crisis response teams" made up of health practitioners who will move into communities where the risk of the disease is highest. Other funds will be used to provide additional testing and counseling, run workshops, and set up drug prevention programs to slow the high infection rate among drug addicts.
The funds will also be used to pay for expensive drugs like protease inhibitors that have been successful in preventing people who are HIV positive from contracting the disease.
"Lifesaving therapies cannot be a luxury reserved only for the rich," said Clinton to applause from an audience made up largely of African Americans representing a range of civil rights and other organizations.
U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher declared the spread of AIDS among blacks and Latinos a "public health emergency."
He noted that AIDS was the leading cause of death among blacks between 25 and 44 years of age. Most alarming, he noted, was that almost two-thirds of AIDS patients between 13 and 24 years old were African Americans. "The complexion of the epidemic has changed," said Satcher. "Increasingly it is becoming an epidemic of color."
Denise Stokes, 29, who was infected with the AIDS virus when she was 13, described how she had suffered because many African Americans are "too timid to talk candidly about AIDS."
In a moving speech, Stokes recounted some of her own difficulties in getting adequate care and treatment. Most African Americans with the disease, she said, were too poor to "walk into hospitals waving insurance cards or cash" and were often "stripped of their dignity by people who are supposed to help us."
The full extent of the AIDS epidemic among minorities was documented in a report released earlier this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation, based in Menlo Park.
"It provided us with the statistics to make the case that HIV/ AIDS in the African American community should be treated as a public health emergency," said Waters.
The report described how the number of AIDS deaths among whites declined by 32 percent in 1996, but by only 13 percent among blacks. The cause, the report said, was because of unequal access to health care among blacks.
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