AIDs on the Rise

Description: Fauci on his projects with Tommy Thompson to fight malaria and AIDS in Africa.

Transcript:

one of the things that I’m most proud of is something that is on the border between policy and science. And that is that a few years ago in 2002, when we had the drugs available in the developed world to have a major, major transforming impact on HIV/AIDS, we started to question what could be done in the developing world – particularly Sub Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. And Tommy Thompson and I were sent to Sub Saharan African countries by President Bush to look around and come back with a proposal of how the United States government might help in the arena of HIV/AIDS to those countries that are poor and don’t have the resources that we do. And we came back with a proposal first to try and block mother to child transmission of HIV. We presented it to the President and his closest advisors. They accepted it. But then they said they wanted to do something even . . . much more broad than that with a much greater impact. So we were tasked with . . . And I spent a lot of time on that – probably about six or seven months of my life working hard on that, which was well worth it – to put together a program of how we can get drugs, prevention, and care to millions of people in Sub Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. And we worked on it, presented it to the President, and with a lot of help from a lot people inside government, outside of government, faith-based organizations, advisors to the President, and people who really cared about it who were able to get the program to be accepted by the President, and to put it into effect by law. And that is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief – or PEPFAR – which started out as a $15 billion dollar program over five years, which the president has now doubled to a $30 billion dollar program for the next five years to aim at preventing millions of infections, treating millions of people, and caring for people. It has been a huge success. The fact that I played a role in getting the thing developed, established and implemented is something that I feel very good about. So I don’t know.

Recorded on: 7/6/2007

Description: GLAAD must keep up with media coverage, just as it has done since the early days of the AIDS crisis, Giuliano says.

 What role does HIV/AIDS play in the LGBT community?

Neil Giuliano:  Well I don’t know if I would term HIV/AIDS as a negative aspect within the movement at all.  I think it’s a health issue that certainly affects more than just the LGBT community, and something that we—there still needs to be fair, accurate and inclusive coverage of what’s going on in the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  I mean, if you look at—especially for my organization, GLAAD was founded by individuals who stood up to the New York Post and other news organizations in the very, very early days of the AIDS crisis when their coverage was clearly defamatory, and as those men got together and said the newspaper is covering this story terribly, they’re using language that’s terrible, it’s unacceptable.  And they realized that when they went to the newspaper and talked about that, the newspaper said, oh, perhaps you’re right on this, and they modified some of their language.  And that’s the early birth of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.  And there’s still work that has to be done within the media with regard to covering the HIV and AIDS community, with regard to the way the disease is being treated, with regard to the way the disease is being transmitted. And I think even within our own community, to focus on the LGBT community, we do need to take responsibility for behavior and for actions and do as much education as we can.

 What effect have advances in HIV treatment had on the community?

Neil Giuliano:  I think there have been some who have been lured into a false hope with regard HIV and AIDS because of some of those treatments.  And so then again the burden is on us to communicate as much as we can and educate people as much as we can, especially those who are young in the community, who don’t remember the early days and don’t remember the amount of tragedy that existed very visibly on a regular basis, as so many in the community were dying off because of their infections.

Recorded on: Mar 4 2008 

Description: We're tired of being careful, Warren says.

Transcript:   I think there’s some fatigue – AIDS fatigue.  People are tired of having to be so careful.  I think people get . . .  I think a couple of things.  One, they’re not informed.  It’s amazing to me, 26 years after this epidemic was discovered here, how many people still don’t know.  They don’t have the correct information about HIV – how it’s transmitted; how you get it; how you protect yourself against it.  It’s amazing!  I talked to a high school student who lives next door to me a couple of years ago, and I was saying, “So you talk about HIV in school, right?”  And she said, “You know I think they may have spent five minutes on it in a health class.”  And I’m like five minutes on the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world, and we expect our students and teenagers to know?  If parents aren’t doing a good job talking about it, and the schools aren’t doing a good job talking about it, there’s something wrong there.  So we’ve gotta do a better job educating and informing people.  And I think secondly there is a reluctance in our culture to put any limitations on ourselves, any limitations on our sexuality.  There is an increasingly, I would say, attitude in . . . just even watching TV in which people are encouraged to explore sexuality.  And if you do that without the confines of faithful relationships, without the confines of commitments to each other, then STDs and HIV are gonna rise.  There’s . . . there’s just no two ways about it.  I don’t know if you’ve . . . You probably know this, but if there are about a million people in the United States who are HIV positive, there are about 65 million people with STDs.  That’s a lot of sexually transmitted diseases, and people are gonna need to do some behavior change.  And we don’t like that.  We don’t like anybody telling us that we need to put any kind of limitations.  But it is for our own health.  It’s for the health of the people that we’re with; for our children.  To me it just makes sense.

Recorded on: 12/11/07

Description: The challenges of infrastructure.

Transcript:

Well I’m not a big expert, but I can say in terms of, you know, the AIDS . . . HIV-AIDS issue in the developed countries, while it isn’t contained, has been, you know . . . we’re in a place that has a medical infrastructure. It has an educational infrastructure. So people are aware of, to a large extent, how this disease is transmitted; what kind of behaviors they need to adopt to to avoid getting it; the fact that drugs are available should you get to be HIV-positive or, you know, eventually get AIDS. I mean there’s a lot of safety nets. There’s a lot of resources. When you look at countries that have no medical infrastructure; that have one doctor for 100,000 people; that have no ability for any drugs to get through; where there’s no real system for distributing drugs or getting out the most basic information, it’s like you’re on the moon compared to what you would have dealing with an issue like this in . . . in a developed country. And you’ve got . . . you’ve got countries in Africa where if you look at certain age groups, 25, 35 percent of the people are HIV-positive. I mean it’s a massive epidemic and it’s, you know . . . affects everybody. It isn’t just restricted to certain segments of the population. You know so you get 6,000 people a day dying just in Sub-Saharan Africa from AIDS none of whom really would need to die if they just had access to pills that cost just a dollar or $1.20 a day. Sort of mind boggling that all these things can go on simultaneously on the same planet. All this wealth, all this comfort, all this infrastructure, and you’ve got, you know, one out of six people in the world still living under a dollar a day. It’s an old problem, but in a sense more magnified now.