Activist Rajner attends Ceremony with the President
(Photo: Courtesy of Michael Emanuel Rajner)
BY DMITRY RASHNITSOV
In the United States, approximately 56,000 people become infected with HIV each year and more than 1.1 million Americans are living with HIV. To combat this growing epidemic, the White House released the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS) and accompanying NHAS Federal Implementation Plan.
Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius also announced that $30 million of the Affordable Care Act’s Prevention Fund will be dedicated to the implementation of the NHAS. This funding will support the development of combination prevention interventions. It will also support improved surveillance, expanded and targeted testing, and other activities.
“We can’t afford complacency – not when in the ten minutes I’ve been talking to you, another American has just contracted HIV,” Secretary Sebelius said. “That’s why our strategy calls for aggressive efforts to educate Americans about how dangerous this disease still is and the steps they can take to protect themselves and their loved ones.”
The vision of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy is to make the United States “a place where new HIV infections are rare, and when they do occur, every person, regardless of age, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or socio-economic circumstance will have unfettered access to high-quality, life-extending care, free from stigma and discrimination.”
The NHAS has three primary goals:
1) Reducing the number of new infections;
2) Increasing access to care and optimizing health outcomes for people living with HIV;
3) Reducing HIV-related health disparities;
“Now, it’s been nearly 30 years since a Center for Disease Control publication called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report first documented five cases of an illness that would come to be known as HIV/AIDS,” President Barack Obama said. “In the beginning, of course, it was known as the “gay disease” — a disease surrounded by fear and misunderstanding; a disease we were too slow to confront and too slow to turn back. In the decades since — as epidemics have emerged in countries throughout Africa and around the globe — we’ve grown better equipped, as individuals and as nations, to fight this disease.”
To accomplish these goals, the NHAS calls for a more coordinated national response to the HIV epidemic and includes a NHAS Federal Implementation Plan that outlines key, short-term actions to be undertaken by the federal government to execute the outlined recommendations. Additionally, the White House issued a Presidential Memorandum directing agencies to take specific steps to implement this strategy.
Since taking office, President Obama’s administration has taken extraordinary steps to engage the public to evaluate what we are doing right and identify new approaches that will strengthen our response to the domestic epidemic. The Office of National AIDS Policy hosted 14 HIV/AIDS Community Discussions with thousands of Americans across the U.S. and reviewed suggestions from the public via the White House website. ONAP also organized a series of expert meetings on several HIV-specific topics, and worked with Federal and community partners who organized their own meetings to support the development of a national strategy.
Fort Lauderdale HIV/AIDS activist Michael Emanuel Rajner attended a presentation at the White House last week that coincided with the announcement. He came back thinking that Obama is working to help those affected with HIV/AIDS.
“While I have yet to have the chance to read the strategy and implementation documents, based on the presentation, I’m confident that our President and his administration are working incredibly hard to address the domestic crisis of HIV/AIDS,” Rajner said. “The President and his administration have openly shared that the plan is not perfect, but it is a starting point for our nation to fix its infrastructure and, in tough economic times, make certain agencies are held accountable.”
Rajner said he had a chance to tell the president personally how much he appreciated his work.
“While President Obama spoke, he parted the gray clouds that have dismissed the anguish and tears of so many of my brothers and sisters,” Rajner said. “As a gay man living with AIDS, I was proud to stand in the White House and say, “Thank you Mr. President” as I shook his hand. My soul that has been tortured for so long from silence, I began to heal from some of that pain.”
Also, Rajner stated that Florida Gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink committed to developing a state strategy for HIV/AIDS while speaking before the Florida GLBT Democratic Caucus last week.
