The biennial XVIII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010) will be held in Vienna, Austria next week from July 18-23. In a timely fashion, President Obama unveiled the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) today.
NHAS focuses on reducing the number of new infections, increase access to care, and reducing HIV-related health disparities. The implementation of NHAS aims to reduce the annual number of new HIV infections in the United States by 25% by 2015.
Although the policy is headed in the right direction, the plan is not perfect. Several activists have also expressed criticism over the policy.
"I think the jury is out as to whether this strategy leads to the reforms we need," says Chris Collins, public policy director at The Foundation for AIDS Research or AMFAR, said in a telephone interview.
The plan explicitly point out gay and bisexual men, black men and women, Latinos and Latinas, and substance abusers as populations with the highest risk of HIV infection. “At a time of limited resources [$19 billion], we must reorient our efforts by giving much more attention and resources to geographic areas with the highest infection rates”, says the plan.
Michael Weinstein, president of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, criticized the administration's intention to redirect money to those groups at greatest risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. "It's not good to pit one group against another and it's unnecessary," he said. "The bottom line is that we should be seeking to get all sexually active people to get an HIV test."
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