White House Considering Shift in HIV/AIDS Prevention Strategies
Originally published by Reuters Health, February 26, 2002
WASHINGTON (Reuters Health) — The Bush administration's task force on AIDS is contemplating a possible shift in the government's approach to HIV and AIDS prevention, promising better targeting of federal money to prisons and African-American communities.
The shift could include advocating controversial condom distribution programs in the nation's prisons, viewed by many public health experts as a repository for HIV infections that consistently find their way back to black communities, according to Scott Evertz, the director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy.
It could also spur members of the conservative Bush administration to sign on to HIV programs concentrating on open discussions of sexual behaviors at the root of the spread of AIDS, Evertz said.
Those discussions have already proved touchy for the White House, which quickly distanced itself from a report last June by then-Surgeon General David Satcher calling for an open national dialogue on sexuality as a way to prevent the spread of teen pregnancy as well as AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
But Evertz said that discussions within the president's cabinet-level task force on AIDS, headed by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, have begun to show a willingness on the part of administration officials to confront the behavioral aspects of HIV infection.
The task force has yet to deliver recommendations to President Bush on a national AIDS strategy. The White House has so far thrown strong support behind programs promoting "abstinence only" as the best way to stem HIV and unwanted pregnancy.
But administration officials are reportedly looking for ways to better target federal AIDS money toward blacks, who have a disproportionate and rising share of new HIV infections in the US.
"We're going to make sure that (federal) dollars follow the epidemiology" of HIV and AIDS, Evertz told reporters during a briefing at a conference on HIV/AIDS in African Americans.
Evertz said that administration officials want to direct more federal funding to AIDS programs working directly in settings where infection rates are highest, such as prisons. Officials from the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons sitting on the task force have begun discussions including the possible promotion of condom distribution in American penitentiaries, he said.
