How Do We Get from Here to There?

One of the biggest challenges when looking at HIV/AIDS is knowing that there are concrete steps to be taken to change behaviors and effect reductions in infection rates, while simultaneously knowing that achieving those behavior changes is extremely difficult. PEPFAR, which is heralded nearly universally as a major success in the global effort to put people infected with HIV on effective treatment regimens, has been criticized in parallel for neglecting the issue of new infections. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization, is attempting to take that disparity and correct it.

The Gates Foundation has launched an initiative to study behavior among at-risk populations, with the hopes of learning what behaviors can be adjusted, and ultimately to reduce the risk of HIV infection. To read more about the initiative, please see this article from the Brookings Institution.

-Until There’s A Cure

America’s Giving Challenge Ends Friday at 3 PM!

The Case Foundation, Causes, and PARADE Magazine’s month-long project to inspire charitable giving is coming to a close. The last day to make donations is this Friday, November 6th. America’s Giving Challenge is an effort to publicize small, continued giving to charities all across the country and around the world. The goal of the event isn’t to amass the most money for a cause — although, that’s a great goal as well! — but rather to encourage supporters to give small amounts and to give them often. Each participant can donate once per day to a cause, and each individual donation is counted.

Until There’s A Cure needs your support in America’s Giving Challenge — can you join us and make a donation of just $10 to help fight the spread of HIV and AIDS? Please visit http://causes.com/UNTIL to join our efforts — let’s work together to End AIDS.

-Until There’s A Cure

News Roundup: Ending the HIV Travel Ban, Funding Stem Cell Research at UCLA, and More

From the NYTimes: On Friday, President Obama announced that he would be signing legislation to end the 22-year travel ban the United States has maintained against HIV-positive individuals, and “a rule canceling the ban would be published on Monday and would take effect after a routine 60-day waiting period.” The President’s enactment of this campaign promise is a completion of a process begun by George W. Bush, but never completed.

Aside from the restriction of travel limitations, the ban’s end will have other important consequences. Foreigners applying for U.S. residency will no longer need to take an HIV test as part of their application process. International AIDS conferences will be possible within the United States. Since the ban’s enactment, “no major international conference on the AIDS epidemic has been held in the United States since 1990.”

For more information, please the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Fox News articles.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a body established in 2004 to oversee the state’s constitutionally-mandated stem cell research efforts, awarded over $49 million in grants to three researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles Broad Stem Cell Research Center. To learn more, please see the article in the LA Headlines Examiner.

Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, has taken a vocal stand in the fight against HIV/AIDS in his country — marking a strong departure from the administration of Thabo Mbeki, who questioned the efficacy of HIV medications as well as the link between HIV infection and the development of AIDS. The new Zuma administration — both government and health ministry — is actively encouraging South Africans to be tested for HIV, to know their status, and to take steps to protect themselves from infection or to seek treatment if they are HIV-positive. For more information on the Zuma efforts to publicize correct and reliable information on HIV/AIDS, please see the New York Times article.

-Until There’s A Cure

Upcoming Event: National AIDS Strategy Meeting to be Held in Berkeley

The White House Office of National AIDS Policy will be holding an event for the Bay Area community to discuss strategy and policy concerns in dealing with HIV and AIDS in the United States. The event will be held Sunday, November 1st, at Berkeley High School, although the Berkeley school district “is not directly involved” with the planning or organization of the meeting.

The Daily Californian discussed the upcoming event:

The White House Office of National AIDS Policy selected the high school as one of 14 forum sites nation-wide because of its accessibility and the 600-person capacity of its auditorium, said Shin Inouye, White House director of specialty media, in an e-mail… The importance of holding a discussion in Berkeley is due in part to the Bay Area’s high number of HIV cases. “The Bay Area has been an epicenter of the HIV epidemic in the United States,” Inouye said.

To read the full article, please click here.

For more information about the White House Office of National AIDS Policy, please click here.

-Until There’s A Cure

“Money needs to be reallocated based on what we know now, not what we knew then.”

In the international aid community, there has always been a debate on how to best allocate funds for development — to say nothing of the debate outside the aid community as to whether aid even works in the first place. Sunday’s Guardian includes a look at how aid funds are spent in Africa, including statements from several prominent HIV/AIDS advocates discussing the misuse of funds aimed at HIV and AIDS in Africa.

One of Africa’s leading health economists, Alan Whiteside, who is director of the Health Economics and HIV/Aids Research Division at the University of KwaZulu Natal, said the flood of donations towards the battle against Aids had also created the conditions for widespread misuse of the funds…The achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015 depends on us getting our focus on Aids right.

“Where those goals are missed by the widest margins, Aids will have been responsible. The focus on treatment has distracted us from prevention. Solutions need to be tailored to the situation in each country. Money needs to be reallocated based on what we know now, not what we knew then.”

The challenge in allocating funds toward HIV/AIDS, or any number of other diseases or development issues, is in ensuring that those funds are used in the most appropriate and most efficient ways. Just as we have to prioritize funding within our country in a realistic and practical way, we must prioritize how foreign aid funding distributed, regardless of the target. The focus should not be on emphasizing certain diseases over others, but rather on supporting effective programs that reduce risk as well as treat those affected by AIDS and other afflictions.

-Until There’s A Cure

Ryan White Care Act Re-authorized, with Updates

Yesterday, the US House of Representatives approved a re-authorization of the Ryan White Care Act, 408 votes for and 9 against. The bill will now be sent to the White House for President Obama to sign, as it has already passed in the US Senate. The bill, which allocates funds to programs providing treatment to low-income individuals living with HIV and AIDS, includes several important features in addition to its usual provisions.

The authorization allows for four more years of funding, with benchmarks associated with that funding to measure progress. It includes a very helpful clause that prevents precipitous drops in funding to districts that report substantial decreases in caseloads from year to year. The bill is also interesting in that it enjoys largely bipartisan support — a welcome change from the partisan rancor over health care during the past several months.

The re-authorization also requires that states report AIDS and HIV diagnosis by name by 2013, although states are permitted to use “code-based data until then at a penalty.” This non-confidential reporting should be an issue to investigate as the debate over healthcare reform continues.

To read more about the bill’s re-authorization, please see the New York Times article, as well as the Times’s report on the House votes.

-Until There’s A Cure

How Do We Stop Stories Like These?

The Washington Post has published a 2-year investigative piece by Debbie Cenziper, detailing the abuses, waste, and tragedy that have plagued Washington D.C.’s struggle with HIV and AIDS in recent years. We encourage you to read the series and help us prevent these tragedies from reoccurring.

-Until There’s A Cure

Thai Vaccine Trial: Overblown Results or Tentative Success?

Ever since the announcement that the largest-ever clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine had been shown to provide at least modest protection against HIV infection, scientists, AIDS policy experts, and pundits have attempted to explain the findings. Often, those explanations left a great deal to be desired.

The trial, conducted in Thailand, utilized more than 16,000 Thai volunteers, was administered by the US Army, and was financed by the National Institutes of Health. The results have been hotly debated ever since their release: some argue that the trial demonstrates a clear efficacy of an AIDS vaccine regimen for the first time, even though the numbers of those protected from infection were quite small compared to the sample size. Others, including The Wall Street Journal, counter that because of that disparity, the statistical significance of the results should be questioned.

Regardless of the ultimate resolution of this debate, the trial has demonstrated one thing clearly: the need for an AIDS vaccine exists. No matter how the results are portrayed, the fact of the matter is that more people have been infected with HIV — and a cure is still out of reach. Whether this particular vaccine regimen is determined to have protected a few or to have had statistically no effect, research must continue.

Until There’s A Cure is committed to supporting that research. We support research performed by IAVI; we support the efforts by AVAC to promote vaccine trials. We helped seed GSID, one of the partners in the Thai vaccine trial. We will continue to support this research because we need a cure — science does not produce easy answers and rarely do benefits arise without struggles and setbacks. We will continue to push for vaccine advocacy, care and services, prevention education, and vaccine research Until There’s A Cure, and we can’t do it without you.

Please join us in helping to make AIDS a memory.

-Until There’s A Cure

Upcoming Events: MNHC Gala, NLAAD, and More

**Reminder: There is still time to help Until There’s A Cure in America’s Giving Challenge! If you haven’t already [and even if you have], visit http://causes.com/UNTIL and help UTAC in the race for $1,000 daily prizes, in addition to an overall $50,000 award! Helping out your favorite cause is easy, and with America’s Giving Challenge, it can be extra-rewarding. The Challenge runs through November 6, 2009 — thank you so much for all of your support in helping to end AIDS!**

October is Hispanic Heritage Month, and October 15th marks National Latino AIDS Awareness Day. Until There’s A Cure is proud to recognize this important awareness day, and we encourage you to take time to learn about how the Hispanic and Latino community in the US is responding to the threat of HIV/AIDS. The UTAC announcement of NLAAD is here; please let us know how you are helping to spread awareness of HIV/AIDS in your own community!

The Mission Neighborhood Health Center, in San Francisco’s Mission District, will be holding its “In the Heart of the Mission” Gala on the evening of October 15th. Tickets support the MNHC’s critical work, providing “compassionate, culturally competent and comprehensive health care services… for the medically underserved with a focus on the Latino/Hispanic Spanish speaking community and its neighbors.” For more information and to reserve tickets, please call the MNHC at 415 552-1013 ext. 225, and see their web site for the announcement here.

World AIDS Day, December 1st, is quickly approaching. Are You Ready?

If you would like to participate in one of several World AIDS Day Bike Rides to support UTAC, please stay tuned to our blog for updates, and remember to become a Fan of Until There’s A Cure on Facebook and to Follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news!

Do you work with an AIDS service organization with an upcoming event we can help publicize? Leave us a note in the comments or send an email to info@utac.org. We look forward to hearing from the community!

-Until There’s A Cure

The True Value of a Gift

We’ve been Tweeting and updating our Facebook status like mad these past couple of days, trying to make people aware of America’s Giving Challenge. The really exciting thing about AGC is not that we generate donations [OK, to be fair, that is REALLY exciting, but it's not the only reason we're thrilled to participate], but that we generate buzz about HIV and AIDS, and can make thousands of people aware of the pandemic. Yesterday, at the start of the Challenge, there were 3 HIV/AIDS organizations in the top 10 for several hours, including Until There’s A Cure. That’s exciting because it means people are paying attention to HIV and AIDS — anyone who works in HIV and AIDS awareness knows that’s something that doesn’t always happen.

But how does America’s Giving Challenge really make a difference? Well, let’s look at a donation made through Facebook [how AGC works this year]. When someone donates, it helps us. But it also generates activity that’s spread throughout our Cause community and Facebook at large. The donor might post their donation on their wall, or comment on it. Her friends will “like” it, or comment on it — if we’re lucky, they’ll even click through, join our Cause, and make a donation of their own! America’s Giving Challenge is a challenge for nonprofits like Until There’s A Cure to generate energy and excitement within their own communities, and it’s a challenge to our community to generate excitement among our friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, doctors, electricians, and everyone else.

America’s Giving Challenge is an opportunity to show that a small donation can go just as far as a large one — and when we get our communities involved, those small donations can go even further. Please help us keep this great energy moving forward… Until There’s A Cure. Donate now at http://causes.com/UNTIL and then let your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers, and your email contacts know how you’ve helped to end AIDS.

-Until There’s A Cure