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This past weekend, the Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP) released Community Ideas for Improving the Response to the Domestic HIV Epidemic: A Report on a National Dialogue on HIV/AIDS. The “Report” serves as an over arching results from the 14 community discussion ONAP organized nationwide in efforts to draft the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS). The NHAS will be the first MAJOR document by the United States addressing HIV/AIDS and the large problem here at home. NHAS will be broken into three parts:
(1) Preventing new HIV infection
(2) Increase access to care and optimize health outcomes
(3) Reduce HIV-related health disparities
The Report allows the public (at large) to see the most crosscutting, and most mentioned (and even some less mentioned) conversations during this data collection period. Throughout the “Report”, ONAP reminds that NHAS is not “…intended to be a comprehensive list of all the action, policies, and programmatic priories needed to respond to the domestic HIV epidemic.”
The Report is divided into the following sections: an Executive Summary, Introduction, Increasing Access to Care and Optimizing Health Outcomes, Methodology, Preventing HIV Transmission, Reducing HIV – Related Health Disparities, Crosscutting Themes, and Moving Forward (whew I can breathe now). Only 73 pages long, but it is chocked full of nooks and crannies of information. (READ THE EMPHASIS) EVERYONE SHOULD TAKE TIME OUT TO READ THE FULL DOCUMENT, it is so much invaluable information especially the data concerning MSM (men who have sex with men) hot off the presses from the CDC.
Being the semi-scientist that I am, I ran to the Methodology portion of the report. Over 4200 Americans attended 14 community forums throughout the country and a few territories. Over two hundred people submitted hand written copies of their remarks and a little more than 700 contributed in a web-based format. 103 skipped protocol (a friend of mine took this route) and sent detailed responses directly to the ONAP inbox … So all together over 5000 submissions were accounted for and all read and placed in a database (WAY TO GO ADVOCATES and FRIEND ALLIED).
Long story short… I believe the Report definitely show the commitment of the Administration toward the NHAS and what they believe is needed to make a positive change in HIV here at home.
*Over 56,000 Americans are infected with HIV every year…
* Men who have sex with men (MSM), account for an estimated 4% of the male population in the US, but 53% of all new HIV infection, making them both the single largest risk group and the group most disproportionately at risk for HIV infection
“Every 17 -year-old I diagnose with HIV represents 60 – 80 years of transmission potential [and] each represent nearly a million dollars in health care cost over their lifetime.” – Minnesota Community discussion
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