San Francisco Chronicle - Sunday, November 6, 2005
Christopher Heredia, Chronicle Staff Writer

Well-known groups from San Francisco and Oakland -- including the Stop AIDS Project, San Francisco AIDS Foundation and AIDS Project East Bay -- largely sat out the demonstration, representatives said. Their reasons included lack of travel money and a desire to focus on accomplishments closer to home.

But that rationale didn't sit well with demonstrators marching through Washington's Anacostia neighborhood. Many were poor and some homeless. They had collected donations and begged and borrowed lodging and food to get to the nation's capital for several days of lobbying, prayer meetings and acts of civil disobedience.

Their goal: to shed light on the growing need for funding for HIV prevention and medical care in poor and minority communities.

"There is an inertia among the largest AIDS organizations in the country, a belief system that AIDS is a way of life," said Charles King, co-director of Campaign to End AIDS, the rally's sponsoring organization, in a phone interview as he marched through Anacostia to a largely receptive audience.

"Certain groups have become complacent about activism," he said. "Well, we're here to say it's time to stop being complacent about HIV/AIDS. Stop using hired lobbyists to do your work and be out there."

Each year, an estimated 43,000 people in the United States are newly infected with HIV, which causes AIDS, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Institutes of Health reported, as of April, that although African Americans represent 12 percent of the U.S. population, 50 percent of total diagnosed AIDS cases, past and present, are among black people.

Activists focused much of their attention on the reauthorization of the Ryan White Care Act, which expired Sept. 30. It had provided more than $2 billion a year to fund medical care and services for people with AIDS. President Bush has urged Congress to reauthorize the act, but legislators have yet to take decisive action.

There were about 500 marchers Saturday, fewer than organizers had hoped for. The reasons cited: competition for attention and resources on the heels of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the war on terrorism, and complacency in gay and bisexual communities about HIV/AIDS brought about by the advent of life-sustaining medications.

The mission of the Campaign to End AIDS is fourfold, King said: get each person with HIV into health care, get medication for those who need it, provide housing for homeless people with HIV, and broaden testing and prevention programs in minority and low-income communities.

To be sure, not all the angst about who was not in attendance at Saturday's rallies was directed at what King described as "AIDS Inc." Although most participants were minorities, King said he hoped that far more would have shown up. Predominantly black churches are among the groups that demonstrators were meeting with through Tuesday.

Juanita Chestnut, a 47-year-old African American AIDS activist from New York City, walked from her hometown to Washington with about 30 others as part of the demonstration, she said, "to put a face on HIV" and to show that black women are also infected with the virus.

"I want to tell the African American community to stop hiding behind doors, talk to each other, find help, come out. ... And to the broader community, I ask that you come out and help us educate ourselves about HIV," said Chestnut, who has been infected for 15 years. "Come out. Ask what we need to stop the spread of this deadly virus."

Jason Riggs, spokesman for the Stop AIDS Project in the Castro, said his organization was involved in the beginning stages of planning the march but decided not to send a representative because it wants to focus on prevention programs for gay and bisexual men in San Francisco.

"We're proud to be seeing the number of HIV infections going down in San Francisco, thanks to local prevention programs such as those put on by Stop AIDS," Riggs said. "We support the mission of Campaign to End AIDS and we have people lobbying for some of the same goals, but frankly our focus is in preventing new infections in San Francisco."

Mark Cloutier, executive director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said his organization sent one staff member and gave $15,000 to send delegates from other organizations to the march, but decided not to have a larger presence because of more pressing priorities, including ensuring that the city doesn't lose Ryan White Care Act funding.

"San Francisco is dangerously exposed," Cloutier said. "We get $25 million a year (citywide) for one title of the care act. If that money is not reauthorized, if I did not pour every available resource into advocating for getting the care act reauthorized, I would be negligent. We do care about the things that have the biggest impact on preventing new infections and taking care of people who are HIV-infected."

Cloutier noted that a majority of the AIDS Foundation's clientele are women and minorities with HIV and people suffering from mental health and substance abuse issues, many of them residents of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood.

Dr. Robert C. Scott, an HIV/AIDS specialist in Oakland with a large African American patient base and a board member of AIDS Project East Bay, said he knew of no members of his group attending the rally.

But he said he is swamped with patients and has little time to get behind a bullhorn.

On the other hand, Scott said he couldn't think of a better time for activists to bring to the attention of lawmakers, clergy and minority communities the scourge of HIV, particularly for African Americans.

"Among the majority race, new HIV cases and deaths continue to drop," Scott said. "In the African American community, particularly women in the rural South, new HIV/AIDS cases continue to rise."

"I see evidence in my own practice. People, many of them poor, are presenting later in the course of the disease. Many don't see themselves being at risk and don't get tested, and we're continuing to see the death rate rise.

"It's a very pressing issue getting the Ryan White Care Act reauthorized and hopefully increase the amount of money going to provide medical care for people with HIV rather than holding at a plateau."

E-mail Christopher Heredia at cheredia@sfchronicle.com.
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