Fitzsimon File

Friday is World AIDS Day, a day set aside to focus attention on the HIV/AIDS epidemic across the world and in our own backyard. It is also a chance to renew calls for policies to make treatment available to those who are living with the disease and to prevent more infections in the years ahead.

The deadly epidemic is still raging in North Carolina and with one notable exception, state policymakers don’t seem to paying much attention to it. There are now more than 30,000 people in the state living with HIV and close to 2,000 people are infected every year. The majority of the new infections are among African-Americans and while sexual contact continues to spread the disease, increasingly the infection can be traced back to IV drug use.

Last session lawmakers finally increased the eligibility for the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) to 250 percent of the federal poverty level, or $24,500 a year.  

The program provides lifesaving medication to people with HIV/AIDS who can’t afford the drugs that cost $13,000 a year. The state eligibility ceiling used to be 125 percent of the poverty level, roughly the cost of the drugs. It was the strictest eligibility in the country and the change will mean lifesaving medication for as many as 800 people in the state.

But the state’s eligibility level is still below the national average and our neighbors. Every state that borders North Carolina provides the medication for people who earn up to 300 percent of the poverty level, or $29,400.

Besides the significant changes in ADAP and a compelling new public campaign to encourage people to be tested for HIV using the slogan “Get real, get tested,” the state’s record on HIV/AIDS remains woeful, despite the heroic efforts of advocates inside state government and outside it.

Lawmakers have not even considered a needle exchange program for IV drug users since legislation to allow the program passed a Senate committee in 1997 and then disappeared because Senate leaders were worried about the political implications of supporting the bill. The political implications, not the fact that lives that would be saved.

No one can dispute that the evidence that the program reduces the number of infections from dirty needles or through sexual contact with IV drug users.

Law enforcement officials have supported the legislation because it lowers the risk that officers will be accidentally stuck with infected needles when searching drug suspects. The current and past State Health Director support the plan. Yet it is not even debated anymore in the General Assembly.

The state has not increased funding for AIDS prevention programs in ten years, even though community organizations across the state have effective programs in place to educate at-risk populations.  It is largely because of the efforts of community groups that the infection rate isn’t much higher. 

But it’s high enough to devastate thousands of lives in our state every year and policymakers burying their heads in the sand is not an acceptable response. A few years ago, the Co-Chair of the House Appropriations Committee was asked about increasing funding for HIV/AIDS programs and said he didn’t want to do anything to help “those people.” 

Those people and their families are still suffering and their numbers are still growing as we mark another World AIDS Day. The open hostility may have subsided and the state has made some progress on providing medication.

But the epidemic marches on and while complacency and indifference from policymakers seems less offensive than hate speech, they are just as deadly when it comes to HIV/AIDS.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.