The Washington Blade; Friday, March 7, 1997
Christopher Jones
The award comes just months after the city scrapped a proposed contract it awarded to Whitman-Walker and KOBA in September 1996. That contract would have provided $200,000 ($67,000 more than the current contract) for a community-based needle exchange program. The D.C. Department of Human Services said in a written statement announcing the cancellation of the 1996 contract that it contained "several technical flaws" and was being put up for bid again. Whitman-Walker and KOBA won that second bid.
Jim Graham, executive director of the Whitman-Walker Clinic, said he, KOBA, and the D.C. government were "absolutely clear" that the current contract was going to be followed through. He said that the current contract has been signed. Asked why the Clinic didn't announce the contract until almost a week after it had been signed, Graham said he wanted to wait until the contract had been "signed, sealed, and delivered." Graham said he received the contract earlier this week.
As for the $67,000 decrease in funds from the previous contract, Graham said:
"These are such scarce dollars, we'll make it work with what we've been given." He also said that he was "led to believe that they may be restoring that."
In addition to exchanging used needles for clean ones, Graham said the program will provide HIV-education and optional HIV antibody testing using the oral HIV tests which the Clinic switched to on Feb. 1.
"We want to carry our new oral test to the people. [Now] we can actually take this test out to the high-risk population," he said. "It's very exciting, because it's about having the silver bullet in terms of prevention but also a chance to bring HIV knowledge through the testing right to the people."
The needle exchange program will be provided by a van servicing four sites, all in Northeast and Southeast Washington.
"The point of it being a mobile [service] is that it's going to move according to drug traffic," explained James Millner, deputy director of communications for Whitman-Walker.
While, as Millner noted, the sites may change, the van is scheduled to service Seventh and Eighth streets, NE; First and K streets, SE; Fourth Street and Rhode Island Avenue, NE; and Division and Foote streets, SE. Dirty needles may also be exchanged at the Clinic's Max Robinson Center, 2301 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave., SE.
Graham said that the Clinic's own needle exchange program, funded by private donations, will meld into the government-funded program. Graham said that the privately funded program has been exchanging anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 needles a week.
The announcement that the government-funded needle exchange program is moving ahead was especially significant given the publication of an article earlier this week which found that anywhere from 294 to 646 cases of HIV transmission in Washington, D.C., from 1987 to 1995 could have been prevented had an adequate needle exchange program been in place. The study estimated that the costs of treating those cases ranged from about $16.4 million to $35.9 million. Several earlier studies also found that needle exchange programs reduce HIV infection rates among intravenous drug users.
The most recent findings were part of "An Opportunity Lost: Estimating the Number of HIV Infections Associated with the Lack of a National Needle Exchange Program in the United States," a study published in the current edition of the medical journal Lancet.
Dr. Peter Lurie, assistant professor at the University of California-San Francisco who wrote the article with Dr. Ernest Drucker, was happy to hear D.C. would begin a needle exchange program.
"It's good," Lurie told the Blade. "Long overdue."
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