ACTION ALERT

The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider amendments to the immigration reform bill this week.

The committee will start meeting on Monday at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time. Contact senators now!

URGE SENATORS TO OPPOSE THESE AMENDMENTS

Cornyn amendment 3. Broadly expands list of who would not be eligible for registered provisional immigrant (RPI) status to include people convicted of single misdemeanor offenses, regardless of how long ago they occurred. Allows no discretion for these individuals even in sympathetic cases, or where U.S. citizen family members would suffer hardship.

Cornyn amendment 5. Completely guts important confidentiality language in the Senate bill leaving millions of aspiring citizens vulnerable if they come forward to apply for registered provisional immigrant (RPI) status.

Grassley amendment 18. Requires RPI applicants to list all names and Social Security numbers used for work which could then be shared by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with federal and state agencies. This undermines the core of the Senate bill by deterring immigrants from coming forward to apply for RPI status.

Sessions amendments 34 and 35. Attempt to overrule the Supreme Court’s decision in Arizona v. United States (invalidating parts of Arizona’s SB 1070), allowing states and localities to engage in immigration enforcement. Also requires inclusion of civil immigration status information in federal crime databases.

URGE SENATORS TO SUPPORT THESE AMENDMENTS

Franken amendment 6. Allows workers to challenge an E-Verify finding after 10 days if the worker had a medical emergency or other good cause to miss the 10-day deadline.

Blumenthal amendment 13. Stops worksite immigration enforcement at worksites where a government agency is investigating labor violations or when workers are asserting their labor rights.

Hirono amendment 16. Expands eligibility of all lawfully present immigrants to Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Medicare. Also expands Medicaid and CHIP to pregnant women and children.

Hirono amendment 21. Allows DREAMers access to federal financial aid.

Please call the senators on the Judiciary Committee with the following message:

“Hello, my name is [YOUR NAME] and I am calling to strongly urge Senator [NAME OF SENATOR] to OPPOSE the following amendments: Cornyn 3 and 5; Grassley 18; and Sessions 34 and 35. These amendments threaten immigrant families and are out-of-step with the bipartisan spirit of S.744.

“I urge the senator to SUPPORT these amendments: Franken 6, Blumenthal 13, and Hirono 16 and 21, which would greatly improve the Senate bill.”

Don’t wait any longer. Please call right now! Contact the senators below who are on the Judiciary Committee:

Senator Leahy (VT): 202-224-4242 Senator Feinstein (CA): 202-224-3841 Senator Whitehouse (RI): 202-224-2921 Senator Klobuchar (MN): 202-224-3244 Senator Durbin (IL): 202-224-2152 Senator Schumer (NY): 202-224-6542 Senator Franken (MN): 202-224-5641 Senator Blumenthal (CT): 202-224-2823 Senator Coons (DE): 202-224-5042 Senator Hirono (HI): 202-224-6361 Senator Lee (UT): 202-224-5444 Senator Hatch (UT): 202-224-5251 Senator Cornyn (TX): 202-224-2934 Senator Flake (AZ): 202-224-4521 Senator Sessions (AL): 202-224-4124 Senator Graham (SC): (202) 224-5972 Senator Cruz (TX): (202) 224-5922 Senator Grassley (IA): 202-224-3744

THANK YOU FOR TAKING ACTION NOW!

By Lou Chibbaro Jr. for The Washington Blade

A newly created national coalition called Pozitively Healthy will advocate for people with HIV and AIDS following the closing in February of the 30-year-old National Association of People With AIDS (NAPWA), according to the coalition’s organizers.

In a May 10 statement, organizers said the new coalition will be an arm of the Washington, D.C.-based national AIDS group HealthHIV, which will manage the coalition’s finances and infrastructure.

“Pozitively Healthy’s mission is to ensure the strong independent voice of the 1.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States,” the statement says.

It says the coalition will advocate for “access to quality health care and the most impactful prevention, care and treatment services in this era of health reform implementation.”

The statement says organizations, including the Names Project Foundation associated with the national AIDS Quilt, and AIDS-related publications will be a part of the coalition in addition to individuals.

“Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Pozitively Healthy coalition will develop and drive an advocacy and education agenda to address issues impacting People Living With HIV/AIDS, with special attention to African-American MSM [men who have sex with men], women, and transgender populations,” the statement says.

Brian Hujdich, executive director of HealthHIV, said HealthHIV and organizers of Pozitively Healthy are inviting AIDS activists and their supporters from throughout the country to apply for membership on a national steering committee created to set the coalition’s agenda and mission.

He said organizers are also inviting activists and others supportive of the coalition’s efforts to become members of the coalition. He said membership is free. Information about Pozitively Healthy and a sign-up form to become a member is available at HealthHIV.org.

Five members of the steering committee, which had 16 members as of early this week, are former officials at NAPWA, including NAPWA’s former executive director and CEO Frank Oldham.

Veteran Washington State AIDS activist Judi Billings, a former NAPWA board chair, has been named co-chair of the Pozitively Healthy steering committee.

David Waggoner, founder and publisher of the Albany, N.Y.-based national AIDS magazine A&U, has been named as the other co-chair.

The prominent role being played by former NAPWA officials and staffers prompted AIDS activists and bloggers Michael Petrelis of San Francisco and Greg Milward of Wisconsin to raise concern, saying events leading up to NAPWA’s financial collapse and bankruptcy took place under their watch.

With creditors owed more than $750,000, NAPWA filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy at the time it announced it was shutting its doors permanently in February.

Oldham announced his resignation from his post as NAPWA’s executive director and CEO in October and left the organization in November before news of the impending bankruptcy surfaced. A document filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Maryland lists Oldham as owing NAPWA more than $80,000 in “accounts payable.”

Oldham and all other former officials at NAPWA have declined to comment on any of the details that surfaced in the public records associated with the bankruptcy filing.

Stephen Bailous, NAPWA’s former deputy executive director and a current member of Pozitively Healthy’s steering committee, told the Blade shortly after the bankruptcy filing that NAPWA’s financial problems stemmed from the organization’s difficulty in raising funds during the downturn in the economy, which he said led to a mounting debt.

Hujdich of HealthHIV told the Blade that Oldham, Billings and the other former NAPWA officials were named to the Pozitively Healthy steering committee because of their years of experience in AIDS-related matters and their distinguished record of advocacy for people with AIDS.

He said that similar to all members of the steering committee, the former NAPWA officials’ role in the coalition would be limited to policy and advocacy matters.

“We’re handling the management of it so that we’ll handle everything financial and any infrastructure with regards to how to help support it,” Hujdich said.

“As it relates to the way NAPWA was managed, none of the former NAPWA board or staff members that are part of the coalition are connected in any way to the running of the coalition financially,” he said. “And so they have no role in anything fiscal.”

According to Hujdich, Pozitively Healthy will operate as an all-volunteer entity, with a membership and most steering committee members located throughout the country.

Added Hujdich, “There shouldn’t be an issue about their involvement. And all the more reason — not just those who were involved with NAPWA but others who are long committed to HIV advocacy — why wouldn’t we want to include their voice and give them an opportunity to do this?”

Just three days after the announcement of the creation of Pozitively Healthy, Oldham testified on behalf of the new coalition at a D.C. City Council hearing on Tuesday.

The hearing, before the Council’s Committee on Health, reviewed the city’s implementation of President Obama’s healthcare reform program related to insurance exchanges created to enable consumers to select affordable health insurance policies.

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Connect with grassroots HIV/AIDS activists nationwide today! Join the Campaign to End AIDS!

By Rod McCullom from Black AIDS Institute for The Body

The third in a series examining the reports of a pediatric “functional cure” and its implications across Black America. In Part 1 we asked whether a Mississippi infant supposedly cured of HIV actually had the virus at all. In Part 2 we considered the mother’s lack of prenatal care and the fact that she fell out of HIV care.

“Stunning” reports of an almost 20-month-old Mississippi infant who had been “cured” of HIV dominated news coverage during early March 2013. Most reports lacked context: The mother did not know that she was HIV positive until her delivery, and later she dropped out of care for almost a year.

This often happens “in states like Mississippi and South Carolina, where there has been a historic Black reliance on public health services,” says Bambi W. Gaddist, Dr.P.H., founder and executive director of the South Carolina HIV/AIDS Council. “It’s very easy for an HIV-positive pregnant woman to be identified much later in the process. And the ‘process’ has become overburdened and underfunded.”

The Worst State to Have HIV?

Connecting people living with HIV/AIDS to medical care and treatment as soon as possible — known as “treatment as prevention” — has become a critical strategy in ending the epidemic. Some experts believe that Mississippi’s conservative politics, underfunding of HIV/AIDS programs and growing socioeconomic disparities both fuel the epidemic and increase the likelihood that more HIV-positive men and women will drop out of care — if they receive it at all.

Black America sits at the epicenter of the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic. Blacks represent only 13 percent of the nation’s population but about 44 percent (pdf) of all new HIV infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mississippi boasts the highest percentage of Blacks of any state — nearly 38 percent — and Black people make up almost 80 percent of all new infections there.

“So it’s very likely the mother and newborn were Black,” says Dr. Gaddist.

In 2011 Mississippi had the sixth-highest rate of new HIV cases in the nation. The state ranks with Florida for having “the highest HIV rates among individuals 13 to 19 years old. Jackson [had] the third-highest HIV infection rate of all U.S. metropolitan areas … in 2009,” reports the Mississippi State Department of Health.

“Meanwhile, an abstinence-education statute forbids even programs offering information about condoms to demonstrate how to use them, but does include a requirement to mention the anti-sodomy laws still on the books,” salon.com reported in a piece that described Mississippi as “the worst state in America to have HIV.”

Veteran HIV/AIDS activist Sean Strub, the founder of POZ and the Sero Project, disagrees with that assessment. “Sadly, there is a lot of competition for that title. Anyone getting prosecuted for having HIV might find the state they’re living in the ‘worst.’ For most people with HIV, the ‘worst’ state for a person with HIV is the one where they live. Holding out Mississippi specifically as so much worse is [also] a way of implying how good it is somewhere else.”

Promoting Prejudice

There also is an “overwhelming stigma associated with HIV/AIDS among African Americans in southern USA,” reports The Lancet. “Many individuals [forgo] testing not only because of limited access to health services, but because of paralysing stigma.”

“From the interviews that I have done with HIV-positive women in Mississippi and across the South, many have said that they had to get over the fact that they were HIV positive before they moved into care,” says Kimberly A. Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of health studies at Texas Woman’s University. “There are many negative attributes associated with being HIV positive among Black people, especially in the South. Also, in the Black community, we still have so much stigma associated around men who have sex with men.”

“I’ve been called a nigger and a faggot by state legislators right in the Capitol,” Alonzo Dukes, executive director of the Greenville-based Southern AIDS Commission, told Human Rights Watch, which released a highly critical indictment of the state’s HIV/AIDS policies.

“Mississippi laws and policies contribute to the problem by promoting prejudice and discrimination against those vulnerable and perceived to be vulnerable to HIV,” the report says. “In some instances, state public health workers have been found to harass and threaten people testing positive for HIV.”

Mississippi Public Broadcasting reports that Mississippi ranks 48th in the nation in public health funding. The state provides few dollars for prevention, housing or prescription-drug programs for PLWHA. HIV/AIDS activists have been fighting massive proposed cuts to the state’s paltry HIV/AIDS funding — slashing almost $10 million from the Mississippi State Department of Health’s budget of $29 million.

Activists have opposed the state’s policies and funding cuts and have called attention to their plight by occupying the statehouse grounds.

Mississippi Burning

The funding cuts are happening at the same time “nearly two-thirds of people in Mississippi with HIV are without treatment,” The Clarion-Ledger reports. The “rate [is] comparable to that in Botswana, Ethiopia, and Rwanda,” Human Rights Watch says. Reducing funding for HIV care and treatment would likely exacerbate these conditions.

Republican Gov. Phil Bryant and the Republican-led state Legislature have filed suit to oppose federal health-care reform — despite widespread poverty and high rates of people without access to health care. In recent months the Republican leadership has also fought Democratic attempts to expand Medicaid and add hundreds of thousands of the working poor to the rolls.

Red tape and unnecessary regulations add to the misery of many PLWHA.

“Mississippi is one of the few, and maybe only, states that requires an in-person appointment to renew your Medicaid,” Luke O. Versher, a field organizer for AIDS Action Mississippi, told Housing Works. “Many people don’t have the transportation, miss their appointments, and that’s how they keep enrollment down.”

Rod McCullom has written and produced for ABC News and NBC, The Atlantic, Ebony, the Los Angeles Times and others. He writes on politics, pop culture and sexuality at Rod 2.0.

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Join the fight! Join the Campaign to End AIDS today!

By Paige Winfield Cunningham for Politico

Politically, it’s a no-brainer: People in the country illegally shouldn’t get government health care benefits.

It’s such a nonstarter politically, in fact, that politicians don’t even question whether it’s smart policy to have millions of people remain uninsured for another decade or more, even if Congress does approve a pathway to their legalization. If anything, some in Congress want to make it tougher for people on that pathway to get government health benefits, and several senators have drafted amendments to the immigration bill that would prolong waiting periods or reinforce other coverage restrictions.

“It’s important to remember that people who are in this country illegally have violated the laws of the United States,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a leader of the Gang of Eight, which drew up the bill that the Senate Judiciary Committee is considering. “Expanding [the bill] to provide health care benefits for people who have violated our immigration law, in addition to being unfair, would, quite frankly, raise the cost of the bill to an unsustainable level.”

When the current immigration debate began a few months ago, Democrats and Republicans alike practically tripped over themselves to assure voters that 11 million undocumented immigrants would not get Medicare, Medicaid or taxpayer-financed insurance subsidies in the new Obamacare exchanges or online markets.

There’s a huge debate about the overall economic impact of allowing undocumented immigrants to become legal, and it’s not only along the usual left-right battlegrounds, as the conservative critique of The Heritage Foundation’s immigration cost study attests. But on the specific issue of health care, many lawmakers say the expense of providing coverage would outweigh any savings from reducing uncompensated care.

Several amendments have been filed to limit taxpayer-financed coverage, although it’s not yet certain which or how many will get a vote in the Judiciary Committee. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), for instance, has filed an amendment that would bar immigrants from getting Obamacare subsidies for five years after they become legal, a process that itself is likely to take a decade or more. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) filed a slew of health-related amendments, including one that would not allow any undocumented immigrant deemed likely to receive government benefits to get provisional status.

And there’s virtually no chance of any push to cover them sooner or more easily. “I think it would be a heavy lift politically,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.).

Talk of covering undocumented immigrants was similarly taboo during the debate over President Barack Obama’s health care law four years ago. The president never included them — although skepticism about whether he would follow through on the policy of exclusion prompted that memorable, “You lie” shout out by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) during a joint session of Congress in September 2009.

The health law that was enacted a few months later not only withholds government health benefits from undocumented immigrants, it doesn’t even let them use their own money to buy health care on the exchanges.

The Gang of Eight package — if it’s ever passed — would by and large follow the same path. Even while undergoing the lengthy immigration legalization process, expected to take a decade or longer, people won’t be able to tap into Obamacare benefits. The one difference is that when they start on the path of legalization — gaining “provisional” status — they would be able to use their own money to buy an exchange policy, if they can afford it. But they still wouldn’t be eligible for tax credits.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), one member of the Gang of Eight, told POLITICO,“We would want them” to buy coverage if they can afford it. “Since they’re not eligible for any benefits, we don’t want them going to emergency rooms for health care and costing money.”

But buying that coverage without help from the government or an employer is expensive.

“Individual coverage is not going to be cheap if you don’t have subsidies, and these are not folks with high incomes,” said Shawn Gremminger, a lobbyist for the National Association of Public Hospitals and Health Systems, which represents safety-net hospitals that treat many low-income and uninsured people.

And that means millions will remain uninsured for years. Often, someone else pays, directly or indirectly, for their care.

“If you don’t include them in the health care plan, then we haven’t gotten away from the issue of uncompensated care,” said the Hudson Institute’s Tevi Troy, who served as deputy secretary for Health and Human Services under former President George W. Bush and advised Mitt Romney. “They’re still going to show up in hospitals; they’re still going to go to emergency rooms.”

And the health law cuts federal aid to hospitals that treat a lot of uninsured people — because there aren’t supposed to be as many uninsured people when the big Obamacare coverage expansion kicks in next year.

Troy opposes the Democrats’ health law, and he doesn’t want it expanded. But he would be open to other approaches, perhaps through the Tax Code, for making insurance more affordable for everyone.

Under the Gang of Eight proposal, immigrants given provisional status would have to wait until they become lawful permanent residents — about 10 years, under the current draft of the bill — before becoming eligible for insurance subsidies in the Obamacare exchanges. For Medicaid, if they’re eligible, they’d have to wait an additional five years after becoming legal.

As things stand now, some of the 11 million do have coverage one way or another — about 5 million had coverage in 2007, The Urban Institute estimated in a study. Most of them received the insurance through a job.

While withholding government benefits, the Gang of Eight proposal could expand access to employer-sponsored coverage to those becoming legal.

For one thing, they could work legally and get covered on the job. And a relatively small number of the people on the path to legalization who get jobs at very small, low-wage businesses could indirectly benefit from tax credits that go to those employers if they cover workers in the Small Business Health Options Program, an insurance market for small businesses, said John Arensmeyer, founder and CEO of the Small Business Majority, which supports the health law.

The flip side: The Gang of Eight proposal contains provisions that would make it easier for people who remain illegal to be found out and deported if they get coverage in Obamacare exchanges.

Keeping millions uncovered for a decade or more has some of the health policy experts worried. But they recognize the conversation isn’t likely to shift their direction anytime soon — not as long as it remains no-brainer politics.

During the health law debate, “I was told by folks on the Senate Finance Committee, ‘We’d love to tackle coverage for the undocumented as part of the Affordable Care Act, but it’s too controversial,’” recalled Gremminger, the safety-net hospital lobbyist. “Now we’re having a similar conversation — with the Judiciary staff.”

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Join the Campaign to End AIDS today!

What Happens Next? Health Reform Strategies for States Not Expanding Medicaid in 2014

TUESDAY, May 14, 2013, sponsored by the Southern AIDS Coalition

11:00 a.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. MT / 1:00 p.m. CT / 2:00 p.m. ET (note the correct time for your time zone).

Join the Southern AIDS Coalition and National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD) for a one-hour webinar and conference call focusing on Affordable Care Act (ACA) implementation strategies for states that are not yet expanding Medicaid.

Click here to register

As many states, particularly in the South, have elected to not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, HIV service providers are left wondering how to cover thousands of currently uninsured PLWHA. This webinar will provide an overview of how to leverage other pieces of the ACA to fill access and affordability gaps, an update on existing Medicaid reforms, and a discussion of private insurance reforms.

Amy Killelea, the Senior Manager of Health Care Access at the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD), will give a presentation highlighting potential opportunities for non-Medicaid expansion states. The webinar presentation will be followed by a question and answer session.

Click here to register

This webinar will be recorded. SAC will email slides a few days before the call to everyone who registers. SAC encourages you to invite consumers, community members, and colleagues to participate with you in this webinar.

Find more resources and blog posts at HIVHealthReform.org.

New York, NY 2013—Housing Works’ 7th Annual Open Air Street Fair returns to Soho on Sunday, June 2nd with even more offerings than ever before! This festive, all-day shopping bazaar takes place on the quaint cobblestone Crosby Street outside of the beloved Bookstore Cafe and features thousands of donated books, records, and CDs sold for $1. This year evangelists from the creative social platform Tumblr will curate a selection of books from Housing Works in their areas of expertise, including art, music, travel, food, and fashion. Kobo, a global leader in eReading will also be on hand to demo their devices.

Favorite goodies of shoppers will return, including seasonal clothing, shoes and accessories from Housing Works Soho Thrift Shop. Local food merchants Coolhaus, Mexicue, Luke’s Lobster and Cemitas will be serving up food fair. Live music curated by Two Boots pizza, our Americana Jamboree partners will continue throughout the day. Proceeds from the annual event will help homeless New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS.

WHAT: Housing Works’ Annual Open Air Street Fair

CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES: The Street Fair features exclusive merchandise from Housing Works Thrift Shops

BOOKS: Enjoy a special selection curated by Tumblr. Find thousands of books from the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe

FOOD: Coolhaus, Mexicue, Luke’s Lobster and Cemitas

WHERE: Crosby St. between Houston and Prince (one block east of Broadway)

BENEFITS: All proceeds benefit Housing Works

Photo from the Financial Times Blog

By Sarah Kliff for The Washington Post

If you want to know what a challenge the Obama administration faces in implementing its signature health-care law, this statistic might help: Fewer than six in 10 Americans know that the Obamacare law is still on the books. Seven percent think the Supreme Court struck it down; 12 percent say Congress repealed Obamacare.

This comes from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is out with a poll Tuesday morning looking at how much Americans know about the health-care overhaul—before a deluge of public outreach, set to begin this summer, kicks off.

The short answer is: They do not know a lot. Most Americans likely to access new health care programs under the Affordable Care Act—either through subsidized private insurance or the Medicaid expansion—say they don’t have enough information to understand “how it [the health law] will impact you and your family.”

This poll does, however, show greater awareness than separate research conducted last winter by Enroll America, a new non-profit that’s leading much of the outreach effort. It found that 78 percent of Americans likely to gain access to health coverage had no idea that such programs would roll out in 2014.

The challenge that the Obama administration faces is more complex than just increasing awareness and improving public awareness. It has a lot to do with improving knowledge at the exact right time—not when benefits are way out in the distance, but also not when the public has passed them by.

Consider what would happen if the Obama administration ramped up its public education effort today. There would television ads, door-to-door campaigns, celebrity endorsements and a slew of other commitments. They would all advertise new health care options—which wouldn’t be available for another seven months.

When I’ve talked to health care advocates, this is a dilemma they talk about a lot. They certainly want more people to know about the law, but at the same time they don’t want to sell a product that won’t be on the market until the end of the year. Open enrollment on the exchanges begins in October for health plan options that will kick in on Jan. 1, 2014.

That’s why Enroll America will wait until this summer or fall to kick off its public awareness campaign. The White House has looked at getting rolling in June. This means that public awareness will probably stay low for the next few months. And health law supporters might be okay with that: They’d rather come to customers with a product to sell, rather than turn up with nothing to offer.

Click through to the original article to see related graphs created by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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Organize now! Join the Campaign to End AIDS today!

Photo from AIDS Alabama

By Denise Mann, HealthDay Reporter, for WebMD News from HealthDay

MONDAY, April 29 (HealthDay News) — New guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force call for virtually every adult to be routinely screened for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The updated recommendations, which are published in the April 30 issue of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, suggest that pregnant women and all people aged 15 to 65 be screened for HIV. The guidelines are now more in line with screening recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“HIV is a critical public health problem. There are 50,000 new infections in the U.S. each year, and we need to find ways to prevent and treat it,” said guideline author Dr. Douglas Owens, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a senior investigator at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, in California.

The guidelines, last updated in 2005, reflect new evidence about the effectiveness of treatment, especially when started early in the course of HIV infection.

“The best way to reduce HIV-related death and disability is to avoid getting infected,” Owens said. “Should someone become infected, we want them to understand that there are very good treatments that will help them live longer and reduce transmission.”

Experts agreed that such blanket screening is the best — and possibly only — way to stop the HIV epidemic in its tracks.

Knowing one’s HIV status is “a first step for both prevention and needed medical services, yet the history of the epidemic has set up barriers such that, in some states, it is still not straightforward to access an HIV test without the need for written consent or a fee,” said Dr. Sten Vermund, director of the Institute for Global Health at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville. “Free, regular screening for HIV, much as we try to have regular blood pressure or breast cancer screening, is one of the best ways to start reducing the HIV epidemic in the U.S.”

Another expert agreed.

“There is a growing — and overdue — realization that treating HIV infection has both a personal and public health benefit,” said Dr. Paul Volberding, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. He wrote an editorial accompanying the guidelines.

“We may have a chance to end the AIDS epidemic, but that all begins with diagnosing infection in the estimated 20 percent of cases in the U.S. [who are] unaware of their status and thus not in medical care,” he said. “Finding infected persons, bringing them into care, suppressing their HIV levels and retaining them in that state are the overriding goals of HIV control. These guidelines, along with those of the CDC, can help in the first step in that care cascade.”

“HIV therapy is the most effective means of preventing all forms of transmission,” Volberding said. “The importance of treatment as prevention was underscored by the very recent failure of the only candidate HIV vaccine in large clinical trials. We may well have to treat our way out of the epidemic, and that process begins with diagnosis and ends with lifelong engagement in care.”

Learn more about risks for HIV transmission at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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*Join the Campaign to End AIDS!*

From our friends at Advocates for Youth

Students in Illinois need your help to correct an outrageous violation of privacy.

Illinois is the ONLY state in which health authorities are required by law to notify school principals of the names of students that test HIV-positive. Their principals can then disclose the information to any school personnel they like.

A bill before the senate, HB 61, would repeal this invasive and unnecessary requirement.

Urge the Illinois Senate to pass HB 61

Illinois’ disclosure law was written in 1987. Unfortunately, even in 2013, HIV remains highly stigmatized. Sharing students’ HIV status without their permission perpetuates this stigma and could discourage young people from getting tested for HIV. Plus, it is a violation of their right to medical confidentiality. Read more about this dangerous law.

Let’s change this law. Sign the petition and tell the Illinois Senate to pass HB 61.

This weekend Housing Works’ annual Design on a Dime event raised a record $1.1 million towards its housing expansion program for people living with HIV/AIDS in New York City. In its 9th year, the 3-day interiors sale and reception was attended by over 3,000 people who shopped 62 rooms designed with floor to ceiling product for sale at deep discounts by some of the world’s top interior designers.

“This year’s event success was truly a result of hard work from some of the most influential interior talent that we have been fortunate enough to see,” David Raper, Vice President for Thrifts Retail of Housing Works said in a statement. “We couldn’t do this without support from the design community that share the same mission as Housing Works to improve the lives of thousands of men, women and children that are homeless and living with HIV/AIDS.”

The fundraiser’s Opening Night Reception was co-chaired by five of the interior industry’s leading females including: Yetta Banks (Viacom), Genevieve Gorder (HGTV’s “Design Star), Evette Ríos (ABC’s “The Chew”), Sabrina Soto (HGTV’s “High Low Project”) and Lara Spencer (“Good Morning America”).

Proceeds from the multi-day event and sale will fund two housing development projects serving clients in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Design on a Dime will furnish 12 apartments in Housing Works’ much anticipated Jefferson Avenue Residence slated to open in the summer of 2013. Additional funds will help turn a vacant 6,000 sq ft. lot, into a beautiful and safe home for 27 single, formerly homeless adults living with HIV/AIDS.

Housing Works would like to thank the many Design on a Dime volunteers who worked to make this event a success as well as the designers, donors, committee and event sponsors for their time, dedication and talent.

Ryan White & the Affordable Care Act: What You Need to Know, from HRSA HIV/AIDS Programs

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is an historic opportunity for people living with HIV (PLWH), including those currently receiving services through the Ryan White Program, to increase their access to affordable, quality health care. Many Ryan White clients will gain access to health insurance or see their current health insurance improve. These transitions will require thoughtful and careful coordination between the federal government, state and local governments, Ryan White Program grantees, and clients.

HRSA will continue partnering with you to ensure uninterrupted comprehensive care for our clients. We invite you to use this site as a resource to help guide you as we approach full implementation of the law in 2014. We hope that you will find the information provided on this site useful and if you don’t find an answer to your question, let us know by emailing RWP-ACAQuestions@hrsa.gov.

New On-Demand Webinar —
Eligibility 101: The Affordable Care Act and the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program – New Opportunities For People Living with HIV/AIDS

What you’ll learn:
~ How the ACA helps peoplw living with HIV/AIDS (PLWH) get health coverage

~ New Medicaid coverage options

~ New private coverage options

~ New enrollment and eligibility verification process

~ What HIV providers need to know

~ Eligibility 101 slides (PPT)

New York, NY – Housing Works held its sold out 9th Annual Design on a Dime Opening Night Reception last evening. 1400 lucky ticket holders enjoyed advance access to the three-day charitable shopping event featuring 62 designer rooms with merchandise for sale at 50 to 70% off retail to raise funds for Housing Works’ homeless and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS. The highly anticipated interior sale opens to the public today and tomorrow from 10am-6pm.

WHERE: Metropolitan Pavilion 125 W 18th Street, New York NY

Celebrity guests included: Co-Chairs Genevieve Gorder (HGTV “Design Star” judge), Sabrina Soto (HGTV’s “High Low Project”), Lara Spencer (“Good Morning America”), (Evette Rios (ABC’s “The Chew”) and Yetta Banks (Viacom), Sam Champion (“Good Morning America”), Mike Woods (“Good Day”), Daisy Lewellyn (Justfab.com), James Huniford (Designer), Tyler Wisler (Designer), Mike Ruiz (“The A—List”), Alex McCord and Simon VanKempen (Bravo).

In conjunction, Housing Works held their first-ever Groundbreaker Awards Dinner the previous evening to honor event founder James Huniford for his work in making Design on a Dime Housing Works’ most successful fundraiser to date. Nickelodeon President of Content and Development, Russell Hicks and Bravo’s Executive Vice President of Development and Talent, Andy Cohen were also honored for their work with the event and the organization. Without their continued support many of our efforts would not be possible.

Hosted by Rachel Dratch, The Groundbreaker Awards Dinner guests included: Mark Consuelos (Actor), Genevieve Gorder (HGTV “Design Star” judge), Sabrina Soto (HGTV’s “High Low Project”), Evette Rios (ABC’s “The Chew”), Michael Boodro (Editor in Chief ELLE DECOR) Jeff Pfeifle (Former President J Crew), Margaret Russell (Editor in Chief Architectural Digest), Heather Thompson (“The Real Housewives of New York City”).

For more information: www.housingworks.org/dime

Groundbreaker Awards Photos

Design on a Dime Photos

WHAT: Hosted by Rachel Dratch, Housing Works’ first-annual Groundbreaker Awards will honor: Bravo’s Executive Vice President of Development and Talent, Andy Cohen, Nickelodeon President of Content and Development, Russell Hicks and interior designer, James Huniford. The dinner and awards ceremony will bring together Housing Works’ closest friends and supporters to honor their significant contribution and impact on the fight to end HIV/AIDS and homelessness in New York City.

WHEN:
Wednesday, April 24th
Cocktail Hour: 6:30-7:30pm
Dinner and Awards: 7:30-9:30pm

Press call time 6:15

WHERE: Metropolitan Pavilion 125 W. 18th Street (Between 6th and 7th avenues)

HONOREES
Andy Cohen (Host of “Watch What Happens Live”), Russell Hicks (President Content and Development Nickelodeon), James Huniford (Designer)

PRESENTERS
Mark Consuelos (Actor), Michael Boodro (ELLE DECOR) Marva Smalls (Executive VP of Global Inclusion Strategy Viacom)

ATTENDEES:
Rachel Dratch (Comedian, Author, former SNL alum), Genevieve Gorder (HGTV Design Star judge), Sabrina Soto (HGTV’s “High Low Project”), Evette Rios (ABC’s “The Chew”), Lara Spencer (“Good Morning America”) Jeff Pfeifle (Former President J Crew), Margaret Russell (Editor in Chief Architectural Digest)

BENEFITS:
Design on a Dime 2013 benefits Housing Works’ newest housing development in Brooklyn: The Hull Street Residence, offering 30 units of permanent supportive housing for single, formerly homeless adults living with HIV/AIDS.

TICKETS:
SOLD OUT

Photos available upon request

For more info visit: www.housingworks.org/dime

WHAT: Design on a Dime is New York City’s most popular interior design benefit. The 3-Day charitable design event, art and travel auction will feature a record 62 top interior designers, who create unforgettable room vignettes with new merchandise sold for 50 to 70 percent off retail to benefit the thousands of homeless New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS. The event opens on April 25th with a ticketed Opening Night Reception and is celebrated with hundreds of VIPs, designers, and friends of Housing Works. Shopping continues with a Free Public Sale, April 26-27.

WHEN:
Thursday, April 25th
VIP Open House 5:30-6:30PM
Opening Night Reception 6:30PM-9:30PM

Press call time 5:30

WHERE: Metropolitan Pavilion 125 W. 18th Street (Between 6th and 7th avenues)

ATTENDEES:
Genevieve Gorder (HGTV Design Star judge), Sabrina Soto (HGTV’s High Low Project), Evette Rios (ABC’s The Chew), Andy Cohen (Host of “Watch What Happens Live”), Lara Spencer (“Good Morning America”) , Nate Berkus (Designer), James Huniford (Designer), Tyler Wisler (Designer), Bridget Kelly (Mike Ruiz (The A—List), Alex McCord and Simon VanKempen (Bravo), Derek Warburton (Stylist), John Bartlett (Fashion Designer)

BENEFITS:
Design on a Dime 2013 benefits Housing Works’ newest housing development in Brooklyn: The Hull Street Residence, offering 30 units of permanent supportive housing for single, formerly homeless adults living with HIV/AIDS.

TICKETS
90% SOLD

photos available upon request

For more info visit: www.housingworks.org/dime

New York, NY April 23, 2013—Housing Works is thrilled to honor Bravo’s Executive Vice President of Development and Talent, Andy Cohen, Nickelodeon President of Content and Development, Russell Hicks and interior designer, James Huniford at the organizations first-ever Groundbreaker Awards. The dinner and awards ceremony will bring together Housing Works’ closest friends and supporters to honor their significant contribution and impact on the fight to end HIV/AIDS and homelessness in New York City.

Hosted by comedian, author and former Saturday Night Live alum, Rachel Dratch, the Groundbreaker Awards Dinner will take place at the elegant Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea on Wednesday, April 24th. The evening will raise crucial funds to break ground on Housing Works’ housing expansion efforts throughout the city.

“Living in New York City in the 90’s I have directly seen the impact this disease can have on a community,” says Host Rachel Dratch. “I’m happy to be part of an evening that not only celebrates the dedication of these men, but raises funds to help provide hundreds of positive New Yorkers a solid foundation from which to build a successful future.”

Presenters also include actor, Mark Consuelos, ELLE DECOR Editor-in-Chief, Michael Boodro and Viacom’s Executive Vice President for Global Inclusion, Marva Smalls. Sponsors of the evening include: HSBC Private Bank, Valspar, ELLE DECOR, One Kings Lane, HBO, Viacom, Nickelodeon and Playmates Toys.

Housing Works 9th annual Design on a Dime Benefit will take place the following evening.

WHAT: Housing Works Groundbreaker Awards Dinner

WHO: Andy Cohen, Russell Hicks, James Huniford, Rachel Dratch, Marc Consuelos, Marva Smalls

WHEN: April 24th 6:30-9:30pm

WHERE: Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W. 18th St., New York City

BENEFITS: Housing Works Hull Street Residence, a new housing development in Brooklyn for homeless adults living with HIV/AIDS breaking ground in 2014.

TICKETS: SOLD OUT www.housingworks.org/dime

Photo from indervilla.com

Ryan White Program Reauthorization Webinar from HIVHealthReform.org on Vimeo.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE SLIDES!

Join HIVHealthReform.org and our partners AIDS United and National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD) for a one-hour webinar and conference call updating you on Ryan White Program reauthorization and what happens next for the program.

Wondering what it will mean if the Ryan White Program isn’t reauthorized this year? Who is working to figure out the changes that are needed for the future of the program? How does all this fit in with health care reform? Why is it more important than ever to focus on federal funding for the program, and what can you do to educate your elected officials?

Ann Lefert of the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD) and Bill McColl of AIDS United – the co-chairs of the Ryan White Work Group of the Federal AIDS Policy Partnership – will give brief presentations, followed by a question and answer session.

Check out the video.

By Melissa Gira Grant on April 19, 2013 for The Nation
Photo from Best Practices Policy Project

On Monday, the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case that will decide if recipients of government aid can be forced to oppose prostitution – or potentially any other issue as a contingency of receiving U.S. funds. The case, Alliance for Open Society International v United States Agency for International Development, arises from a controversial policy governing AIDS education, prevention, and treatment, a decade-long fight that’s crossed political lines and was kicked off by Rep. Chris Smith as part of a larger conservative attempt to undermine reproductive and sexual health care. With HIV and AIDS projects facing closure if they don’t adopt the government’s position on sex work, it’s sex workers who are paying the ultimate price.

From the onset of the global AIDS epidemic, sex workers have been scapegoated for the spread of HIV – sometimes even by those who claim to help them. Around the globe, AIDS provided an excuse to close red light districts and step up enforcement of anti-prostitution laws. In one early example, in 1988, California considered a bill to forcibly test all people arrested for prostitution-related charges for HIV. If positive, they could face felony charges. Fears, myths, and stigma – fueled by a lack of HIV education and a refusal among policymakers to consider the reality of the epidemic – have historically made sex workers, along with gay and bisexual men and injection-drug users, an easy target.

Now, over thirty years into the epidemic, with that much more evidence available on the social and structural factors that drive HIV, policy still lags life-threateningly behind. One such policy is embedded in what’s regarded as the United States’ cornerstone AIDS policy, PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). Passed into law in 2003 under President George W. Bush, PEPFAR has moved approximately $46 billion to programs working to prevent and treat HIV. But if your HIV program supports sex workers? You could find yourself denied funding and your doors shut.

PEPFAR contains what’s been termed the anti-prostitution pledge, which forbids organizations who receive PEPFAR funding from “promoting” or “advocating” for “the legalization or practice of prostitution,” and requires organizations to adopt a policy “explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” In some ways, the pledge resembles the now-repealed Mexico City Policy, or global gag rule, which forbade non-governmental organizations who received U.S. funds from using even entirely separate funds to provide or refer to abortion services. Like the global gag rule, the pledge requirement limits not just what recipients can do with their PEPFAR funds, but with all their funds. But the pledge goes further than the global gag rule in two significant ways. First, in compelling recipient organizations to adopt a policy stating they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking, organizations and the people who work within them are more than gagged – they must take a vocal stance on an issue that may contradict both their public mission and their private beliefs. Second, it applies not just to international recipients (as the global gag rule did), but also to those organizations incorporated or based in the United States. Therefore, charge the organizations who have brought suit against the pledge, this is a violation of their First Amendment rights.

The anti-prostitution pledge has already been rejected by lower courts, and so comes to the Supreme Court on the government’s appeal, with USAID defending their enforcement of the pledge. In 2005, Alliance for Open Society International (AOSI) filed a suit challenging the pledge, and won in district court, receiving a temporary injunction barring its enforcement. After numerous government appeals, as well as successive attempts by USAID and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to clarify how the pledge is enforced in light of the legal challenges, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2011 that the pledge requirement “falls well beyond what the Supreme Court and this Court have upheld as permissible conditions on the receipt of government funds.” The pledge, the Court stated, “does not merely require recipients of [PEPFAR] funds to refrain from certain conduct, but goes substantially further and compels recipients to espouse the government’s viewpoint.”

What has this meant in practice, for people working in HIV prevention and treatment? According to a recent analysis of the pledge’s impact published in the Journal of the International AIDS Society, whether or not organizations chose to adopt an anti-prostitution stance, the pledge has resulted in HIV and AIDS projects losing funding, shutting down, or facing investigation. The analysis also reports that as a result of program closures and investigations, sex workers were isolated from other HIV and AIDS projects. Facing the threat of excluding sex workers from prevention efforts, Brazil turned down $40 million in PEPFAR funding rather than sign the pledge.

“The pledge requirement makes people hesitant to engage in programming because there’s considerable confusion about what is and isn’t allowed with your private funds,” Zoe Hudson, a senior policy analyst at Open Society Foundations, told The Nation. “When groups fear that starting a program or taking a stand might run afoul of the law, they’re inclined to think, ‘forget it, I’m going to go do something else.’” The pledge has also led some organizations to “self-censor,” said Hudson. “We’ll hold an event, and then a group will say, ‘We couldn’t possibly come to that because it might violate the pledge.’ And we’ll say, ‘Actually, the preliminary injunction prevents the government from taking action against you.’ But the point is, if you’re dependent on U.S. government money for your development work, then you don’t want to take any of those risks.”

The pledge, in a way, extends the exclusion and criminalization faced by sex workers in the United States to the organizations who venture to include them in their U.S.-funded programs – this, despite the fact that USAID regards sex workers as one of their “most-affected risk populations.” In what way, then, can PEPFAR effectively reduce HIV among sex workers, when it’s also producing an environment where those best positioned to support them are cut off from the resources to do so?

“I helped write PEPFAR,” Rep. Barbara Lee told The Nation. “This was an idea that came out of the Congressional Black Caucus, right before President Bush’s first State of the Union.” Lee said that it was after getting Democratic and Republican consensus on PEPFAR that Rep. Chris Smith proposed an amendment. “I’ll never forget that day,” said Lee. “We thought we had the votes to pass it based on negotiations, but then Chris Smith offers this – what did he call it? A conscience clause. This was the start of this anti-prostitution clause.”

Smith’s amendment adding the anti-prostitution pledge to PEPFAR came with other Republican amendments that have also been challenged by advocates, such as requiring the “ABC approach“ – abstinence, be faithful, use a condom, with emphasis on the A and the B. For ten years now, Smith has defended the pledge, both from failed attempts to remove it from subsequent re-authorizations of PEPFAR and from the courts. Speaking before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2007, Smith alleged that his amendment was necessary in order to prevent PEPFAR from making the U.S. “enablers of prostitution and sex trafficking,” even as district courts had already rejected the pledge. In 2010, when USAID and HHS considered amending guidance on how the pledge should be enforced in response to the legal challenges, Smith claimed that in doing so, “The Obama Administration is enabling sex trafficking and prostitution all over the world. The brothel owners and operators and sex traffickers want U.S. taxpayer funds. The Administration is practically working hand-in-glove with them.”

This is not a belief shared by all those in Congress who authored PEPFAR. Several current and former members of Congress – including Rep. Lee as well as Republican PEPFAR supporter Sen. Bill Frist and Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy, who has worked on anti-trafficking policy – state in their brief to the Supreme Court that Congress’s AIDS strategy is in reality undercut by the anti-prostitution pledge. “The strategy that Congress chose,” they write, “reflects Congress’s determination that, absent violence or coercion, conveying a government message explicitly opposing prostitution is not an effective way to address that high-risk behavior, and could disserve [PEPFAR]’s HIV/AIDS-fighting purpose.”

“I’ve visited a variety of countries around the world and talked to sex workers,” said Lee, “and I really understand how this is a big problem, in terms of getting the kind of treatment, services, and prevention that they need.” (In July 2012, sex workers disrupted a session on U.S. AIDS policy at the International AIDS Conference, demanding “Repeal the pledge, reform PEPFAR“ and occupying the session hall as both Frist and Lee spoke.) Were it not for the pledge, said Lee, “we’d save more lives. That’s the bottom line. And because of the stigma and because of all the issues around this, we’re not reaching the numbers that we need to reach.”

It’s Smith’s position that the government must defend this Monday: that advocating against prostitution is “central” to PEPFAR. “What the government is trying to argue,” said Hudson, “is that this requirement is essential for the effective operation of the program: programs in foreign countries are hard to monitor and NGOs are a representative of the U.S. government, so they should be able to screen people based on their views. They argue that eradicating prostitution is central to their global HIV/AIDS strategy.” By this logic, in order to prevent sex workers from being infected with HIV, more emphasis is placed on eradicating sex work than on eradicating HIV.

But that isn’t the case before the court on Monday. For the plaintiffs, who are supported with amici briefs from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Cato Institute, Partners in Health, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the American Jewish World Service among others – Monday’s arguments are not about sex work, or even HIV. They will argue that the government cannot, as a condition of funding and as Hudson explained, “force people to take an opinion on a controversial issue. The government is not allowed to tell groups what to think.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

*Join the Fight! Join the Campaign to End AIDS!!*

By Robert Espinoza, Senior Director – Public Policy and Communications at Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE), for the Huffington Post
Photo by NBCLatino

Helena Bushong is 60, transgender and living with HIV/AIDS. In 2002 she was dually diagnosed with HIV and AIDS and given six months to live. Ty Martin is an aging advocate who leads a support group for older gay black men with HIV/AIDS in the historic Harlem neighborhood of New York City. His group members grapple with stigma, the questions related to accelerated aging as HIV-positive people and a general longing for community. Both Helena and Ty are LGBT and people of color. And both of them combat the health disparities and socioeconomic challenges associated with aging as people who are marginalized on multiple fronts — a reality rarely discussed in the mainstream aging field or in the popular LGBT rights movement. The virtual silence on this subject lives out in their personal and political lifespans.

A new policy report from SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders) seeks to challenge that silence. “Health Equity and LGBT Elders of Color“ explores 10 policy areas where health and wellness can be improved for older LGBT people of color (a population that encompasses multiple groups that are diverse across race, ethnicity, culture, language of origin and more). The report examines policy topics such as federal funding gaps, the ways in which health reform implementation can reach marginalized people, LGBT-specific barriers within programs such as Social Security and much more. And as it relates to the stories above, the report speaks to the importance of interventions in areas that explore the intersection of health, aging, sexual and gender identities and racial and economic inequality. As one example, the AIDS epidemic has always singled out people of color and LGBT people, and it now uniquely affects the first generation of older people to age with HIV/AIDS, according to the report.

The premise of this new report is that while LGBT elders of color experience profound health disparities across multiple areas, they are often omitted from policy approaches related to health in later life. When major legislation or health initiatives are announced and implemented, rarely do they account for what it means to age as people of color and as LGBT people. In my experience, the oft-cited assumptions are that a “universal” approach to health and aging will work equally well among all people (including people of color and/or LGBT people), and that barriers exist only in relation to one aspect of a person’s identity (which neglects how many of us experience discrimination at multiple levels, often at the intersections of our identities). Research and common sense explode these two assumptions, yet to challenge them would require a dedicated infrastructure of aging advocates versed in the variety and complexity of inequality. Unfortunately, while LGBT people of color are best poised to explain this multidimensional approach, they remain largely absent in the aging field as lead spokespeople or nonprofit directors, as political advocates and as subjects in important policy proposals. It doesn’t help that most nonprofits led by and for LGBT people of color are small and underfunded — and until this report, only a few national organizations spoke to the needs of LGBT elders of color.

Tracking the existence of disparities is an important first step to advancing health equity among marginalized populations — but we must also move from the intellectually detached posture of merely citing disparities to one that explores their sources, manifestations and, ultimately, solutions. For example, this new report argues that health supports are rarely offered in ways that are culturally and linguistically appropriate for LGBT elders and elders of color; in turn, these groups are less likely to understand and access the available benefits. The report argues for improving health access by enacting new amendments on the Older Americans Act. In addition, the report recommends that the state-level outreach, enrollment and education efforts tied to health reform work with community advocates who are situated in marginalized communities to propose regulations and help lead these efforts. I spoke on this subject at the recent ASA national conference, where an advocate told me that if health reform is to work effectively, “it must leave no community behind.” Better put, it should start with those communities that have always been left behind.

Another pervasive challenge to addressing these types of health disparities is the dearth in data about LGBT elders of color, which has numerous root problems and consequences. Federal and state survey instruments in the health and aging fields rarely pose questions on sexual orientation or gender identity. In those rare surveys where this data is collected, the older adult samples tend to be too small to draw representative samples, especially among narrower subgroups such as LGBT elders of color. Furthermore, these elder samples tend to skew “wealthier” and more educated, which misrepresents the population. (It also might speak to the lack of age-appropriate survey designs that can reach more isolated LGBT older people or low-income people, many of whom are people of color.) This new policy report asks federal agencies to invest in better data collection and focused research on LGBT elders of color. Without this analysis, LGBT people of color are left without the research to quantify how health inequality plays out in their lives, and without the stats to make data-driven arguments that are often required by government and private funders, journalists and advocates, among others. Inequality is a reinforcing cycle; we must disrupt it one solution at a time.

Now is the time to draw the spotlight on these solutions. Health disparities are rising across marginalized populations, yet few aging programs consider interventions that work effectively with these communities. Health reform efforts are moving at a rapid-fire pace across the country, at the potential expense of communities of color and LGBT people. The Older Americans Act is up for reauthorization and is primed for supporting LGBT elders. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are under scrutiny and in need of both strengthening and reform.

Helena and Ty demonstrate that health disparities among LGBT communities of color are in dire need of attention and support, which affects all of us. Helena recently wrote, “HIV/AIDS is not just an LGBT issue but a community and national issue as well. I am concerned about the readiness of the health care and aging service providers to care for those of us who will be on this Earth the longest, because it impacts my sense of dignity as a human being.” She’s right: Our dignity as a populace should be matched with the dignity of a tailored, large-scale response that explicitly engages LGBT elders of color. We need responses that are as multi-faceted as the lives we inhabit.

The report “Health Equity and LGBT Elders of Color” is currently available free of charge. Download the report here.

By Rob Moritz and John Lyon for the Arkansas News Bureau

LITTLE ROCK — After a long day of wrangling, the Senate on Wednesday night passed legislation to fund Arkansas’ proposed private-option for health care expansion with federal Medicaid money.

“It’s a victory for Arkansas, for the people of Arkansas, for the businesses in Arkansas, for the hospitals in Arkansas,” Gov. Mike Beebe said after the Senate’s 28-7 vote on House Bill 1219. “It’s taking something that most Arkansans would never have approved and making it better.”

The House and Senate met into the night to tack amendments onto enabling legislation meant to strengthen the state’s hand in expanding health care under the federal Affordable Care Act, but it was the Senate’s approval of HB 1219 that was critical in providing the revenue stream for what would be a first-in-the-nation plan.

The bill goes to the governor.

”I do not want to spend money increasing the size of government,” said Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson, R-Little Rock, who voted for HB 1219. “But, the only way we’re going to reign in the size of government is to have a chance to reform the entitlement programs … I’m afraid we have one window, one opportunity to reform and it’s right now.”

Sen. Jim Hendren, R-Gravette, said he opposed the bill because he was concerned about the growing national debt.

“We can’t continue to spend our kids and grand children’s … future,” he said.

Senators met in a morning session and convened briefly in the early afternoon without taking a vote on HB 1219, which would grant the Beebe administration permission to use millions of federal Medicaid dollars to subsidize private health insurance for an estimated 250,000 low-income Arkansans through a new health insurance exchange.

Supporters apparently were short of the three-fourths majority needed — 27 votes in the 35-member Senate — to pass the appropriation bill. The Senate approved the measure in its first nighttime meeting of the legislative session.

HB 1219 passed the House with just two votes to spare Tuesday after falling short in the first House vote Monday.

Also Wednesday, the House and Senate referred matching bills — HB 1143 and SB 1020 — containing enabling legislation for health care expansion, which both chambers previously passed, to each chamber’s committee on public, health welfare and labor to add matching amendments, which the committees approved.

The Senate passed the amended version of HB 1143 at 7: 45 p.m.The House later concurred in the amendment and sent the bill to the governor.

The House passed the amended version of SB 1020 after 9 p.m. The bill goes to the Senate for concurrence in the House amendment.

The amendments contain language clarifying or emphasizing that:

—If the federal government fails to grant all requested waivers for the private option, the legislation will not take effect.

—One of the necessary components of the private option is permission from the federal government for the state to develop a pilot program to create health savings accounts known as “Independence Accounts” that give the account holders some control over how their Medicaid dollars are spent.

—Businesses will not have to pay a penalty or tax for their employees earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level who obtain insurance through the state insurance exchange instead of through their employer.

—No aspect of the private option can be changed except by the state.

—As required under the Affordable Care Act, 80 percent of the money insurers collect in premiums must be paid out in claims.

The amendments also add Sen. Missy Irvin, R-Mountain View, as a co-sponsor of the enabling legislation. Irvin previously opposed the private option but testified in the House public health committee the amendments would allow her to support it.

Irvin told the committee that what it took to win her support was “to make sure that we stay in control and that we are doing something that is completely transformative for the state of Arkansas, that will go towards job creation, that will protect taxpayers, that will protect patients and make sure the patients have ultimate freedom in their health care, which is for me the most important part of that bill.”

Beebe said Wednesday night that he supported the amendments and that his staff discussed the amendments with officials with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to make sure they were acceptable. That federal agency must give final approval to the state’s plan before it can take effect.

”If there’s a message about this,” Beebe said of the Legislature’s work to craft a new private option health insurance plan, “the message is Washington, Republicans and Democrats can work … without regard to party labels, (they) can figure out what’s best for their people and go solve a problem and do something for the benefit of their constituents.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

*Join the Campaign to End AIDS!*

By Megan N for HIV Health Reform

Exciting news: The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced a grant opportunity to fund insurance navigators in federally-facilitated and state partnership marketplaces. Navigators will provide information and guidance to people enrolling in insurance through marketplaces, qualified health plans, and Medicaid.

This is a great opportunity to get federal funding to train and pay staff to help case managers and other HIV professionals link clients with coverage.*

See the grant announcement.

Want more information about insurance navigators?

CMS will hold a conference call for potential applicants on Friday, April 19, 2013 from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. EDT. The call will give an overview of the grant and will have some time for callers to ask questions. Toll-free teleconference phone number: 877-267-1577; ID: 2917. Before then, you can look over the grant fact sheet to see if this grant is a good fit for your organization.

~ Save the date for Enroll America’s webinar, “So You Want to Be a Navigator?: Best Practices for Federal Navigator Grant Applicants,” to be held Thursday, April 18th, from 2:00-3:15pm EDT. Register for the webinar here.

~ FamiliesUSA also has some great resources on navigators. Check out their Preparing Navigators Tool Kit for more information.

*Organizations in the following states are eligible to apply for this new federal funding opportunity: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

From our friends at the National AIDS Housing Coalition

DEADLINE APRIL 17

Dear NAHC Members and Supporters,

If you haven’t already, please contact the housing staffer in your Representative’s office TODAY and ask that your Representative sign the HOPWA letter being circulated by Rep. Nadler. Rep. Crowley and Rep. McDermott.

This letter, addressed to the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee, requests that the Subcommittee fund the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program at $335 million for FY2014.

The text of the “Dear Colleague” letter sent by Rep. Nadler, Rep. Crowley and Rep. McDermott and the letter to the Subcommittee Chair and Ranking Member are below or click here for the PDF version of the letter. The letter closes April 18, so please act NOW!

~ Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-225-3121 and ask for your Representative’s office

~ Ask to speak to the housing or health staffer and request that your member co-sign the HOPWA letter sponsored by Rep. Nadler, Rep. Crowley and Rep. McDermott

~ Let NAHC know of the result of your outreach: nahc@nationalaidshousing.org

Thank you for all that you do,

National AIDS Housing Coalition
______________________________________

Support the HOPWA Program

Dear Chairman Latham and Ranking Member Pastor:

We write to request that the Committee once again support the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program in the year’s Transportation-HUD appropriations bill. While the HIV/AIDS community, including the National AIDS Housing Coalition, has recommended a funding level of $365.2 million, which would ensure that 62,500 households in need would receive the housing support that could save their lives, we urge the Committee to, at a minimum, restore funding for this important, highly effective and bipartisan program at its FY10 funding level of $335 million.

HIV/AIDS continues to challenge communities nationwide. According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 48,100 people in the United States were newly infected with HIV in 2009, and of those who know their diagnosis, fifty percent remain outside of care. AIDS housing experts project that half of the 1.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. will need some form of housing assistance during their lifetime. The HOPWA program enjoys wide bipartisan support and is the only federal housing program that specifically provides cities and states with resources to address the housing crisis facing people living with HIV/AIDS and their families. Housing’s role in helping people access and adhere to care is unquestionable. In the most recent program year, ninety-five percent of HOPWA clients receiving permanent housing remained stably housed and 87% had contact with a healthcare provider.

Research shows that stable housing leads to better health outcomes for those living with HIV. Inadequate or unstable housing is not only a barrier to effective treatment, but also puts people with HIV/AIDS at risk of premature death from exposure to other diseases, poor nutrition, stress, and lack of medical care. Housing interventions are critical in our continued fight against HIV/AIDS, and even modest investments in stable housing programs saves federal and state tax dollars. For example, in the Chicago Housing for Health Partnership program, participants who received housing assistance used one-third fewer inpatient hospital days and one-quarter fewer emergency room visits than their counterparts who did not receive housing assistance. In the same study, 40% of the HIV-positive participants who received housing achieved undetectable levels of HIV as compared to 21% of their counterparts not receiving housing.

HOPWA is a national safety net for people battling HIV/AIDS, providing competitive and formula grants to all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands since 1992. HOPWA enables cities and states to design and provide community-based, cost-effective housing for people living with HIV/AIDS, and their families, with maximum flexibility to meet local needs. In addition, the administrative costs of the program are capped, ensuring the money goes directly to serving people with HIV/AIDS.

HOPWA remains an essential component in the array of programs needed to assure the availability of safe, affordable housing for low-income people with HIV/AIDS. Therefore, we urge the Committee to recommend funding for HOPWA at $335 million in this year’s bill.

Sincerely,

Jerrold Nadler
Joseph Crowley
James McDermott

By Mike Cason for Alabama Media Group

MONTGOMERY, Alabama —- A busload of high school and college students came to the Alabama State House today wearing blue T-shirts in support of a bill to repeal state law that requires sex education courses to teach that homosexuality is not an acceptable lifestyle and that homosexual acts are against the law.
Rep. Patricia Todd, D-Birmingham, is the sponsor of the bill that would remove those provisions from a state law that specifies minimum content for sex education courses.
Alabama also has a law against sodomy, but a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Texas case struck down anti-sodomy laws as unconstitutional.

Lauren Banks, director of policy and advocacy for AIDS Alabama, said the State House visitors today were part of the Alabama Alliance for Healthy Youth, which includes members from AIDS Alabama, the Alabama Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, and Advocates for Youth, a national group.

“Right now, if you’re going to teach sexual health education in the schools, you must say 10 things,” Banks said. “Most of those things are really good. One of those things says that it is a criminal offense to be homosexual. And that is simply not true. … We simply want the truth to be taught to our students and we’re here to ask our representatives to pass that bill.”

As part of their advocacy efforts, the students from the alliance gave lawmakers fact sheets about effective sexual health education.

They also gave some lawmakers information about a petition in support of Todd’s bill. The petition drive was organized by AIDS Alabama and Advocates for Youth, in conjunction with another group, All Out.

All Out is an international organization that advocates for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, according to Sara Perle, campaign manager for All Out.

Banks said the petition has received 18,480 signatures through an online campaign.

Todd introduced the bill last week.

The current law says that sexual education courses must, at a minimum, teach:

“An emphasis, in a factual manner and from a public health perspective, that homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.”

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Join the Campaign to End AIDS!

By John Hanna for The Kansas City Star

TOPEKA — A promise from Kansas’ health department Thursday to continue protecting AIDS and HIV patients from being quarantined has resolved a dispute over a legislative proposal for helping medical personnel and emergency workers who may have been exposed to infectious diseases.

State House and Senate negotiators agreed on the final version of a bill that still would repeal a 25-year-old law specifically banning state and local health officials from quarantining people with AIDS or the virus causing it. Both chambers voted to rescind the law, but the move faced strong criticism, including from the Kansas Equality Coalition, the state’s leading gay rights group.

Kansas Department of Health and Environment officials said that even without a specific ban, state law prevents quarantines unless they are reasonable and medically necessary – conditions that cannot be met for AIDS and HIV patients. The final version of the bill repeats those limits on quarantines, but critics had said such language wasn’t enough to protect AIDS and HIV patients from potential discrimination.

Other provisions of the bill require KDHE to draft rules by the end of the year to ensure that medical personnel and emergency workers learn quickly whether they’ve been exposed to infectious diseases in treating patients or handling materials. State Epidemiologist Charlie Hunt pledged to legislators that the rules will spell out which diseases can lead to quarantines, and AIDS and HIV won’t make the list.

The promise was enough for the Equality Coalition to accept the bill, though it would prefer to keep the ban on quarantining AIDS and HIV patients in state law. Legislators hoped to vote on the final version of the measure Friday, when approval in both chambers would send it to Gov. Sam Brownback.

“We’re good,” said Tom Witt, the Equality Coalition’s executive director and lobbyist. “This alleviates our concerns.”

KDHE officials and some legislators involved in the negotiations over the bill have been frustrated by the criticism of the measure.

The bill is designed to protect medical personnel, laboratory workers, firefighters, law enforcement officers and prison employees. Backers say a single set of statewide rules – instead of a hodgepodge of local policies – will make it easier for such personnel to learn whether they’ve been exposed to diseases and to get tested.

“The whole thing all along has been one big misunderstanding,” said lead House negotiator David Crum, an Augusta Republican.

HIV is spread most often through sexual contact, contaminated needles or syringes, infected blood or blood products or from infected women to their babies at birth or through breastfeeding. Hunt said in a statement the health department never intended to seek authority to quarantine AIDS or HIV because it would never be medically necessary.

And lead Senate negotiator Mary Pilcher-Cook, a Shawnee Republican, said the 1988 law banning quarantines of AIDS and HIV patients became unnecessary over time.

“It was understandable back in the 1980s, when many people were not educated on how HIV was transmitted, but today that’s not the case,” she said.

Witt said critics never believed state or local health officials contemplated mass quarantines of AIDS or HIV patients but simply wanted to lessen the potential for discrimination against them.

“Our concern is always about people in more remote areas of the state engaging in individual harassment,” Witt said.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri still has concerns, and lobbyist Holly Weatherford said the group will address them when the state health department writes the rules. Weatherford said her group worries that the bill would allow state and local health officials to force people who come in contact with medical personnel or emergency workers to be tested in a broad set of circumstances.

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*Join the Campaign to End AIDS today!*

Sent on behalf of our friends at the National AIDS Housing Coalition (NAHC).

Dear NAHC Members and Supporters,

Please contact the housing staffer in your Representative’s office TODAY and ask that your Representative sign the HOPWA letter being circulated by Rep. Nadler. Rep. Crowley and Rep. McDermott.

This letter, addressed to the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee, requests that the Subcommittee fund the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program at $335 million for FY2014.

The text of the “Dear Colleague” letter sent by Rep. Nadler, Rep. Crowley and Rep. McDermott and the letter to the Subcommittee Chair and Ranking Member are below or click here for the PDF version of the letter. The letter closes April 8, so please act NOW!

1. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-225-3121 and ask for your Representative’s office.
2. Ask to speak to the housing or health staffer and request that your member co-sign the HOPWA letter sponsored by Rep. Nadler, Rep. Crowley and Rep. McDermott.
3. Let NAHC know of the result of your outreach: nahc@nationalaidshousing.org

Thank you for all that you do,

National AIDS Housing Coalition

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Support the HOPWA Program

Dear Chairman Latham and Ranking Member Pastor:

We write to request that the Committee once again support the Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) program in the year’s Transportation-HUD appropriations bill. While the HIV/AIDS community, including the National AIDS Housing Coalition, has recommended a funding level of $365.2 million, which would ensure that 62,500 households in need would receive the housing support that could save their lives, we urge the Committee to, at a minimum, restore funding for this important, highly effective and bipartisan program at its FY10 funding level of $335 million.

HIV/AIDS continues to challenge communities nationwide. According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 48,100 people in the United States were newly infected with HIV in 2009, and of those who know their diagnosis, fifty percent remain outside of care. AIDS housing experts project that half of the 1.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the U.S. will need some form of housing assistance during their lifetime. The HOPWA program enjoys wide bipartisan support and is the only federal housing program that specifically provides cities and states with resources to address the housing crisis facing people living with HIV/AIDS and their families. Housing’s role in helping people access and adhere to care is unquestionable. In the most recent program year, ninety-five percent of HOPWA clients receiving permanent housing remained stably housed and 87% had contact with a healthcare provider.

Research shows that stable housing leads to better health outcomes for those living with HIV. Inadequate or unstable housing is not only a barrier to effective treatment, but also puts people with HIV/AIDS at risk of premature death from exposure to other diseases, poor nutrition, stress, and lack of medical care. Housing interventions are critical in our continued fight against HIV/AIDS, and even modest investments in stable housing programs saves federal and state tax dollars. For example, in the Chicago Housing for Health Partnership program, participants who received housing assistance used one-third fewer inpatient hospital days and one-quarter fewer emergency room visits than their counterparts who did not receive housing assistance. In the same study, 40% of the HIV-positive participants who received housing achieved undetectable levels of HIV as compared to 21% of their counterparts not receiving housing.

HOPWA is a national safety net for people battling HIV/AIDS, providing competitive and formula grants to all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands since 1992. HOPWA enables cities and states to design and provide community-based, cost-effective housing for people living with HIV/AIDS, and their families, with maximum flexibility to meet local needs. In addition, the administrative costs of the program are capped, ensuring the money goes directly to serving people with HIV/AIDS.

HOPWA remains an essential component in the array of programs needed to assure the availability of safe, affordable housing for low-income people with HIV/AIDS. Therefore, we urge the Committee to recommend funding for HOPWA at $335 million in this year’s bill.

Sincerely,

Jerrold Nadler
Joseph Crowley
James McDermott

New York, NY April 2013—In just three weeks, over 62 design stars will come together for Housing Works’ spectacular interior design shopping benefit, Design on a Dime, at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea. All five of this year’s co-chairs, Yetta Banks, Genevieve Gorder, Evette Ríos, Sabrina Soto and Lara Spencer will attend to raise funds for Housing Works, a non-profit with a mission to end AIDS and homelessness.

Design on a Dime features the worlds top interior designers who will create room vignettes using new, donated merchandise from some of the most sought after brands, which is then sold for 50 to 70 percent off retail pricing. Event sponsors include Valspar paint and HSBC Private Bank. ELLE DECOR returns the official media partner of Design on a Dime 2013.

Now in its 9th year, the benefit will help to raise funds for Housing Works’ newest residence for New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The Hull Street Residence consists of 30 units of supportive housing and will break ground in 2014.

Here’s a sneak peak at some of this year’s exciting steals:

Bronze Bulldog Sculpture by William Sweetlove
Courtesy of Debuck Gallery for Marc Houston Lifestyle & Interiors
Housing Works Price: $3,000. Retail Price: $7,000

Ceramic Blue Buddha Table Lamps by Objectiques
Courtesy of Santiago Tomas Designs Housing Works Price: $1,200. Retail Price: $2,850

Cara Sofa in Hipster Tuxedo fabric by Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams
Courtesy of Bloomingdales
Housing Works Price: $2400. Retail $5045

Nordic inspired dining chair. Materials: walnut, leather and antique brass buckles
Courtesy of Kati Curtis Design
Housing Works Price: $1,400. Retail Price: $4,161

Molteni Glove Chair by Modulo 3 Corp
Courtesy of David Scott Interiors Housing Works Price: $350. Retail Price: $1,053

Hand-blown glass pendants with thick clear band optic lens by John Pomp Studio
Courtesy of Dering Hall
Housing Works Price: $900. Retail Price: $1,990

For more steals and deals from all of our designer rooms follow Housing Works Inc. on Pinterest. Enter our “Pin a Room” contest April 8-19th for a chance to win 2 tickets to Design on a Dime 2013.

WHAT: Housing Works 9th-annual Design on a Dime Benefit

WHO: Yetta Banks, Genevieve Gorder, Evette Ríos, Sabrina Soto and Lara Spencer join dozens of other top designers and celebrities.

WHEN: VIP Open House, April 25th (5:30 -6:30pm) Opening Night Reception and Shopping (6:30pm-9:30pm)

Public Sale, April 26-27 (10am-6pm)

WHERE: Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W. 18th St., New York City

BENEFITS: Housing Works Hull Street Residence, a new housing development in Brooklyn for homeless adults living with HIV/AIDS breaking ground in 2014.

TICKETS: www.housingworks.org/dime Ticket buyers can also call 347-473-7457.

By Maia Szalavitz for The Fix

Since AIDS, I’ve worked to try to help addicts unite as a political force. Go ahead and laugh. But we remain the only “disease community” that can’t stand up for itself.

It’s hard to convey the sense of crisis felt by people using IV drugs and facing AIDS in the early ‘90s: In New York, at least half of needle users were already infected—at least 100,000 people—and there was no treatment, let alone cure or vaccine, in sight. The presence of death was always palpable. As was, for me, a deep frustration that most people in recovery seemed unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

While gay men had ACT UP street activism and Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) services, there were no similar groups for addicts. In fact, the very idea seemed outlandish: Active addicts were thought to be too chaotic to even bother to save their own lives, let alone take political action, and recovering people were seen as too fragile or too wrapped up in the apolitical 12-step movement to organize.

Mitch Rosenthal, the director of Phoenix House, which was then the largest drug-treatment provider in the city and a powerful political force, was one of the most steadfast opponents of needle exchange. Some treatment programs even refused to accept people infected with HIV. More often than not, the organizations that should have been supporting us stood in the way of what would save our lives and even shunned people who were ill or dying.

In those years, I was attending 12-step programs daily—and finding it extremely distressing that few recovering people seemed to think action against AIDS was essential. I recognized that the traditions wisely precluded political activism in the name of the program, but surely that didn’t mean recovering people shouldn’t otherwise try to fight for their own interests?

And so, in 1993, I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, using my own byline to show that it was possible to be “out” about recovery. It began like this:

People don’t think of addicts like me when they imagine intravenous drug users. I’m a white woman who works as a producer for a national PBS talk show. Five years ago I was shooting cocaine and heroin up to 40 times a day.

When Americans picture a heavy drug user, they see an ignorant, immoral, undisciplined criminal: the worst caricature of the racist view of minorities. But because addicts are in the closet, no one banishes that image. And this lets addiction and AIDS continue to kill us. If we want to fight those diseases, recovering addicts had better come out and organize. There’s no other constituency for the change we need.

When I wrote that, I was looking for any signs of activism by drug users and former users, hoping to write about them. I discovered that around the world, there were small groups, typically led by one or two charismatic people, which were attempting to organize. From London and Liverpool in England to San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, some drug users did not simply see AIDS as a “thing we cannot change.”

Fortunately, there were a few inspiring examples in New York. Last week, I wrote for The Fix about ACT UP’s Needle Exchange Committee and Jon Parker, but also critical to the struggle was an organization founded by Yolanda Serrano, known as ADAPT, or the Association for Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment. Starting in 1987, they worked in some of the city’s hardest-hit areas, giving out bleach kits to clean needles before syringe exchange was legalized.

In fact, it was the threat by Serrano to start handing out needles illegally that led the city to found a pilot needle-exchange program in 1988, under Mayor Ed Koch. There was widespread opposition from some minority groups who actually labeled needle exchange as genocide—seeing it as a cheap replacement for treatment aimed at killing people off, rather than helping them. That spurred the next mayor, Mayor David Dinkins, to shutter the program, which, having been based just across from the city’s courts and prosecutors’ offices, was not exactly in a location likely to succeed, anyway. He said that needle exchange was a “surrender” in the drug war; his health commissioner even claimed that drug use was a more serious health threat than HIV.

But that led to the activism I covered last week, which resulted in the de facto legalization of needle exchange programs in 1990 in the New York state (although formal changes in the law would come much later). This helped lead to the virtual elimination of HIV infections in children and a decline in prevalence among IV drug users from 50% in the early ‘90s to 16% today.

Another bright spot of early addict activism was the work of Howard Josepher, a former heroin addict of the beat era. He had been among the first graduates of Phoenix House and later directed one of its residential programs. In 1988, he founded ARRIVE, a program to teach ex-offenders who had recently come out of prison about HIV and AIDS, which soon became much more than that.

Josepher realized that Phoenix House’s tough, confrontational approach wasn’t going to be useful in HIV prevention. Something much more welcoming was needed to get people who were just out of prison interested in attending a program focused on AIDS. Since they weren’t required to attend, honey was going to be far more useful than vinegar in getting them in the door and keeping them engaged.

The lure would also be that those who graduated the program could get jobs as outreach workers, often at ARRIVE itself—and that they’d have a place where they were welcomed and respected. Crucially, people didn’t need to stop using drugs in order to participate. Lots of active users just out of prison who were not interested in staying drug-free were willing to attend a program that could provide employment and didn’t require or even focus on abstinence.

For many, the certificate they received upon graduation represented the first voluntary course they’d ever completed. Today, more than 9,500 people have graduated, many going on to become leaders in New York’s AIDS and addiction programs. Twenty years later, Josepher’s organization, Exponents Inc., is still going strong.

When ARRIVE began, the idea of having active and recovering users in the same program was seen as untenable, practically blasphemous. But soon, ARRIVE found that the mix was actually therapeutic: often, the active users would cut down or quit because they were inspired by those who were abstinent. And even if they didn’t, a study showed that they reduced their HIV-risk behaviors.

But Josepher wasn’t content to simply provide jobs and training. He saw that political action was needed as well. And so ARRIVE soon began turning up at AIDS demonstrations or doing their own street actions, bringing dozens of users and ex-users to call for change.

Of course, I don’t mean to imply that ARRIVE was the only face of addict or user activism in New York: There was also Housing Works, which grew out of ACT UP, a group called Stand Up Harlem and several others that rose and fell quickly for different reasons. My own relationship with these organizations was complicated: As a journalist, I had to keep my distance, but I also wanted to help make change. This led to a great deal of agonizing on my part over what I could and could not do, at a time when journalism itself was changing its notions of “objectivity” and “advocacy.”

During this period, I also learned about the enormous challenges such advocates faced, challenges that went beyond the stigma and hatred experienced by gay people. These related to the facts about drug use and addiction and made even the question of “coming out” much more complicated.

Basically, most drug users were not addicts—so they didn’t care about the issue much. Sure, you had avid marijuana smokers who identified themselves as such, but this group often disdained “hard drug” users, particularly injectors. Cocaine and heroin addicts, of course, had their own problems. And then there were the conflicts among addicts. Even among people who identified themselves as recovering from addiction, the drunks looked down on the junkies and the junkies despised the drunks. Let’s not even get into the debates over that type of language and what people involved in drug taking should be called.

There was also the split between active and recovering people. Active addicts were often too dysfunctional to sustain activism without significant support. People in early recovery either didn’t feel safe around them or were too busy with their own recovery to become activists—outside of the oases of harm reduction provided by programs like ARRIVE and needle exchanges.

To make matters worse, those who were beyond early recovery often wanted to put the past in the past—or thought that 12-step anonymity meant no activism related to addiction. Finally, there are the deep divisions of race and class faced by all activism, but made even more acute in relation to drugs and addiction. And, of course, the problem of relapse.

Once you did get beyond all that and found a few people who agreed that something needed to be done, there were arguments over policy and strategy. Should the focus be needles or treatment? What about legalization and decriminalization? If we call for more money to spend on our issues, where should it go?

These conflicts, divisions and arguments have meant that there are still very few “out” users and former users organized politically around addiction to this day. The groups that do exist, like Faces and Voices of Recovery (FAVOR), do important work, even if I often wish they would take bolder and less conventional stands.

And while the urgency of the AIDS crisis has waned with the development of effective treatment and prevention—interventions that would have come far later or never at all without the activism that did occur—drug policy remains harmful and oppressive.

For example, if there were an antidote to HIV—like naloxone, the antidote that can reverse opioid overdose and save lives—that was nontoxic but available only by prescription, would ACT UP have let the FDA get away without changing the law pronto? I don’t think so. Drug users, ex-users and people who care for them need to think long and hard about why even these obvious and non-radical changes aren’t being demanded.

Having experienced them firsthand, I don’t minimize the obstacles: They need to be taken seriously, studied and understood in the context of other, related movements that have faced them, such as activists with mental illness and disabilities. But as ACT UP proved, a small group of committed people can absolutely change the world

Maia Szalavitz is a columnist at “The Fix.” She is also a health reporter at “Time” magazine online, and co-author, with Bruce Perry, of “Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered” (Morrow, 2010), and author of “Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids” (Riverhead, 2006).

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Looking for resources to start organizing? Join the Campaign to End AIDS.

By David Edwards for Raw Story

The founder of an organization which advocates for the rights AIDS patients says that a proposed Kansas law which allows HIV people to be quarantined would essentially give cover to religious officials who might want to discriminate against LGBT people.

“That rural county health department — and I hate to say it — potentially could use this bill to justify their religious belief that could override their professional belief,” Positive Directions Inc.’s Cody Patton told KWCH on Tuesday.

Right now, it’s against the law in Kansas to quarantine HIV positive people but House Bill 2183 changes that. The measure is intended to allow firefighters or paramedics who are exposed to bodily fluids during the course of duty to get the victim’s blood tested without a court order. But lawmakers also added language that allows people with HIV and AIDS to be quarantined.

Patton said that he understood the need to protect emergency officials, but lawmakers had not thought through their decision to quarantine people with HIV.

“They didn’t get that whole concept of being discriminated against,” he pointed out. “And they didn’t get that stuff still happens today.”

Last week, the state Committee on Health and Human Services rejected an amendment by Sen. Marci Francisco (D) that would have restored the exclusion for people with HIV.

AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein told Gay Star News that the situation reminded him of the “earliest, darkest days” of the AIDS epidemic when there was little understanding of the disease.

“At best, it is short-sighted of Kansas legislators to reject Senator Francisco’s amendment,” he noted. “It either shows how little they understand about HIV and how it is transmitted—it is not spread through casual contact such as TB or other airborne communicable diseases—or it shows that they want the ability to quarantine people, and/or discriminate against them in other ways as they see fit.”

“For the Senators, either choice shows a real lack of understanding about public health and safety—one of the most basic services that is government’s role to ensure.”

The bill was passed by the Republican-controlled state Senate last Thursday by a vote of 29 to 11. It breezed through the Republican-controlled state House earlier this month, 122 to 1. Both the House and Senate appointed members of a conference committee earlier this week to finalize the bill before it goes to Gov. Sam Brownback’s ® desk to be signed into law.

Watch this video from KWCH, broadcast March 26, 2013.

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*JOIN THE FIGHT!! Join the Campaign to End AIDS today!*

NORTH AMERICAN HOUSING & HIV/AIDS RESEARCH SUMMIT VII

September 24 – 27, 2013
Montréal, Québec

“Closing the Housing Gap in the HIV Treatment Cascade”

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About the Summit Series

Launched in 2005, the Housing and HIV/AIDS Research Summit Series is a unique interdisciplinary forum for consideration of research findings and policy initiatives that focus on the role of housing, poverty and other structural determinants of HIV prevention and care outcomes. Summit meetings support knowledge transfer and evidence-based skill building among people with HIV/AIDS, health and housing researchers, service providers, and policy makers at the global, national and local levels. The Summit Series has become the primary venue for informing HIV/AIDS housing policy in North America, and is an influential forum for broader discussion of the role of housing in disease prevention and management.

A strong evidence base identifies housing status as a key social driver of HIV vulnerability and health outcomes, and shows that receipt of housing assistance has an independent, direct impact on HIV care, health status and mortality among people living with HIV/AIDS. Participants in Summit Series meetings share and discuss new research findings, and then work together to translate the evolving evidence on housing and health into concrete action strategies to inform policy, practice and ongoing research.

The North American Summit Series and International AIDS Conference satellite meetings have enabled partners to:

~ Build a platform that invites the development of germane research;
~ Promote an HIV/AIDS housing research and policy agenda internationally;
~ Develop new partners and enhanced support for structural HIV prevention and care interventions; and
~ Create policy change on the national and local levels by means of evidence-based strategies.

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NAHC will provide a limited number of scholarships for individuals to attend Summit VII who are, or have been, consumers of HIV/AIDS housing and related services. Scholarship recipients are encouraged to be active Summit participants. To prepare recipients for discussions, relevant research materials and background information will be made available prior to the Summit.

To apply click here or visit our website at www.hivhousingsummit.org.

Scholarships will cover the Summit VII registration fee, travel costs, three nights at a conference hotel, and the cost of meals not covered by the registration fee. However, applicants are encouraged to seek support from local programs to cover all or part of accommodations and travel. This will enable more consumers to participate. Please contact NAHC if you need a letter of support to provide to a potential sponsor.

Interested consumers are asked to complete the attached application form and return it to NAHC by e-mail or mail on or before June 15, 2013. Notice of acceptance will be provided not later than July 26, 2013.

National AIDS Housing Coalition
727 15th Street, NW, 11th Floor
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: 202-347-0333
Fax: 202-347-3411
E-mail: nahc@nationalaidshousing.org
Website: www.hivhousingsummit.org

On behalf of the Latino Commission on AIDS, Black AIDS Institute, National Hispanic Medical Association, National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, Hispanic Federation, and the Balm in Gilead, I would like to invite you to sign on to this letter to President Barack Obama in support of immigration reform.

Linked here is the sign on letter to the President urging him to support legislation that keeps families together, focuses on humane border enforcement, simplifies and updates the immigration process, adjusts the quota system, and ends the 3 and 10 year re-entry bars for foreign nationals who have previously resided in the country unlawfully. The “Gang of 8” Senators who are working on the immigration deal will be copied as well.

This is a time where we have tremendous momentum to reform our broken immigration system, and as HIV/AIDS organizations or organizations that work on HIV/AIDS issues, we should urge the President to support immigration policy that creates a fair, just system and promotes the dignity of all immigrants.

The letter is open to organizational sign-ons. If your organization would like to sign on, please go HERE (or copy and paste this into your web browser: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QVMV3TW).

The deadline for sign on is COB Friday, April 12th.

Please forward this letter widely, and don’t forget to include the sign-on link!

Best,
John

John Hellman, M.A.
Director of Advocacy
Latino Commission on AIDS

From our friends at the National Alliance of State & Territorial AIDS Directors.

Dear Colleagues,

Attached is a sign on letter to the President urging him to immediately redirect $35 million to the state AIDS Drug Assistance Programs (ADAPs) and $10 million to Ryan White Part C programs in FY2013 in order to ensure continuation of care and treatment for thousands of people living with HIV/AIDS. The Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the government for the remainder of FY2013 does not include $35 million in emergency ADAP funding and $10 million for Part C medical clinics announced by President Obama on World AIDS Day (December 1), 2011.

This funding currently is being used by 15 states/territories to provide life-saving medications to individuals living with HIV/AIDS. (AL, AK, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, MT, NE, NJ, SD, TN, WA, WI, VI) This funding also is supporting key staff at Part C supported HIV clinics nationwide, helping these programs serve more patients. If funds aren’t restored, it could lead to an estimated 7,920 clients being removed from the ADAP program and many Part C funded HIV clinics reducing services and closing their doors to new patients.

This letter is open to both individual and organizational sign ons. If you or your organization would like to sign-on please click on the link HERE or go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YFLWPBN The deadline for sign on is COB Monday, April 1.

Please forward this sign on opportunity widely!

Best,
Emily

Emily McCloskey
Manager, Policy and Legislative Affairs
National Alliance of State & Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD)

From our friends at the National Minority AIDS Council

Act now! Urge your senator to oppose amendment that will deny access to health care to immigrant families!

Right now, the Senate is considering an amendment by Senator Sessions, #208, that would have a grave impact on immigrants and their families.

Sessions #208 would deny health care to legal immigrants who were formerly undocumented.

This amendment would have a devastating impact on low-income immigrant families. They also would undermine bipartisan efforts to achieve common sense immigration reform that are currently underway in the Senate.

We urge you to call your senators NOW at and encourage them to OPPOSE Sessions amendment #208. Please call now and make your voice heard!

Suggested script: “My name is [your name] and I am calling to urge [your senator’s name] to oppose Sessions amendment #208. It is vitally important to ensure that health care is available to low-income immigrant families.”

By Nilda Ricard for TakePart

On a chilly evening, Angel, a frail, sick man wearing nothing but a tank top to shield him from the wind, gathered just enough energy to brave his way to the nearest subway station. Angel was living with AIDS and also suffered from late-stage cancer. He barely spoke English and had just been released from Rikers Island Prison Complex, New York City’s main jail.

Angel found his way to Lutheran Hospital in Brooklyn—the only place he knew he could find help at that late hour. He struggled to tell hospital attendants what had happened.

Eventually the hospital connected with the Department of Health & Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) at Rikers Island, which was familiar with Angel’s story.

Rikers Island contacted me, Nilda Ricard, the director of the Drop-in Center for the Fortune Society, a New York City-based prisoner re-entry agency that provides an array of services, including transitional healthcare for HIV-positive individuals coming out of jail and prison.

When I received the call from DOHMH about Angel, I jumped into action. As soon as I arrived at the hospital, I located Angel. He looked close to death. I connected with the hospital’s social worker. Together, we were able to get him admitted so he would receive the medical attention he so desperately needed.

I also knew that he would need access to long-term care. I located a skilled nursing facility that could take him—the Highbridge Woodycrest Center in the Bronx—and made immediate plans for his transfer so that he would have access to the best medical support and services available.

On our way to the facility, Angel pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. It was the phone number for the one and only close family member he had—his sister in Puerto Rico. I contacted her immediately. After learning that her beloved brother was still alive, she reached out to relatives who lived in New York.

The reunion of his family brought Angel great joy. Over time, he grew healthier, living another full year. At the time of his death, he was surrounded by family who loved and cared for him.

The harsh truth is that everyone is not as lucky as Angel. He could have died that night on the steps leading down to the subway or in his attempt to make it to Lutheran Hospital.

Every day at the Fortune Society, we meet men and women like Angel with HIV/AIDS, who are released from jail and prison and left on the streets. A majority of the time, if they are not immediately connected to services, they become disconnected from care, which results in unfilled prescriptions, missed medical appointments, and a return to behaviors that often lead back to jail.

We work with the Department of Health & Mental Health and Hygiene, the Department of Correction and our sister organizations to intervene the minute released inmates step out those doors and offer the services they need to survive—which is exactly what my work at the Fortune Society’s Drop-in Center entails.

Helping more than 3,000 individuals annually, the Fortune Society, founded more than 40 years ago, offers myriad programs and services to help formerly incarcerated men and women rebuild their lives.

In fact, the Fortune Society was one of the first organizations in the nation to recognize and address HIV/AIDS in jails and prisons. In 1990, it implemented an HIV Health Services program in response to the high rates of HIV found among the criminal justice population. Services focus on identifying HIV-positive individuals in jail and facilitating post-release linkages to essential healthcare services—including doctor referrals, counseling, HIV-specific housing, transportation, substance abuse and mental health treatment and more.

A recent grant from Kaiser Permanente, one of America’s leading healthcare providers and not-for-profit health plans, will enable Fortune Society to continue, and to connect an even greater number of formerly incarcerated individuals with the services they need to stay on track, as well as provide them with intensive long-term follow-up care. It will also support prevention education that will help reduce the likelihood of HIV transmission to others in the community.

The problem of HIV/AIDS is not going away any time soon. New York City still has some of the largest numbers of people in jail who are HIV positive, and more resources are always needed—both for services and for advocacy to change the way that the criminal justice system impacts the lives of people with HIV/AIDS.

As Fortune continues to work with this vulnerable population, we will focus not just on connecting them to appropriate healthcare and services, but do our best to ensure that they have a chance to live healthy, fulfilling lives.

Not everyone is always as lucky as Angel.

Nilda Ricard is Director of the Drop-in Center at the Fortune Society, a nationally recognized non-profit that helps formerly incarcerated men and women re-enter their communities.

From TheBody.com
Image by Castor Vermooretele

Whether you are male or female, gay or straight, live in an urban area or a rural area, if you are a person of color — especially an African-American — you are disproportionately at risk for contracting HIV. It’s important to remember that knowledge is power — and knowing exactly what the numbers are behind the HIV epidemic among African Americans is the first empowered step in joining the fight against HIV.

~ View the full-sized infographic
~ Download the infographic as a .pdf
~ Add the infographic to your website

By Jessica Danforth for Indian Country Today Media Network; Photo from National Native American HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Facebook

“The beginning of sexually transmitted infections laying siege upon Indigenous peoples’ self-determination occurred when Columbus’s syphilis infected crew sexually terrorized Indigenous women over 500 years ago. HIV has become the latest procession of this colonial legacy, linking violence to infection. Today, the responsibility of defending our self-determination against ongoing colonialism is an active right of Native peoples, but one that includes a call for accountability of non-Natives to claim. National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day is therefore a time when the gravity of this story and the strength of our efforts toward healing & health is most appropriate when observed by Natives and non-Natives alike.” —INSPIRE HIV Prevention, Initiative of Native Sisters Preventing Infectious Risks through Empowerment

Awareness days exist for many issues these days—for different types of cancers, to bullying, even bird-feeding and fair trade. While awareness and information sharing are important tenants of social change, what do these days really mean on the ground? How do we concretely effect change in one day alone?

This was a recent conversation we had at the Native Youth Sexual Health Network prior to National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day on March 20. In any given week our staff and youth leaders are working front-line in Indigenous communities throughout North America and it’s usually a time of the year we get more requests to speak to the realities of HIV and AIDS in our communities. And again, while this is critical and a great opportunity, we recently reflected on how far-reaching the issues of HIV/AIDS are to not just do prevention messaging but to specifically address historical traumas while not being solely relegated to deficit or disease control models of doing things. A common saying we have at NYSHN is that as Indigenous peoples or youth we aren’t “at risk” all alone, which is how we often have to read about ourselves. Colonization, racism, and not having access to culturally safe care are what actually put our lives at risk.

So what’s the importance of having a conversation like this on an awareness day to effect change? Krysta Williams, our advocacy and outreach coordinator, shared her perspective:

“The day is still important not only because of the issues of stigma and discrimination still faced by people living with HIV but because we are at a point where things will stay the same—annual events that talk about stats—or they will radically shift with the leadership of young Native people who are calling for more than just awareness. Every workshop we do we get more questions, they want to hear what else can be done, more than just knowing the facts but what are our options after diagnosis, how to improve quality of life and generally a big WHY about discrimination and stigma, even in the face of knowing the facts and having access to treatment.

“We are also seeing that it’s us as communities, nations and families that need to take charge—not the law, or mainstream public health or the AIDS industrial complex—but us. We aren’t waiting for a magical solution but actively making the real change of moving towards doing things our way, treating people with respect and love.”

I remember finding out when the first National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day happened and how appreciative I felt that there was finally a day where we could actually speak to what is specifically happening in our own Native communities—rather than being pressured to again join the line of “high risk statistic populations”. I spoke to Robert Foley, president and CEO of the National Native American HIV/AIDS Prevention Center, about the significance of the history of when the awareness day started:

“The first National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day was held on March 20, 2007, and was a collaborative effort between the National Native American HIV/AIDS Prevention Center, Colorado State University Commitment to Action for 7th-Generation Awareness & Education: HIV/AIDS Prevention Project (CA7AE: HAPP), and the Inter-tribal Council of Arizona with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It takes place on the first day of spring each year as it was believed that this day best exemplifies the ceremonies that occurred on the Spring Equinox for American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian peoples—celebrations of growth, rebirth, healing and rejuvenation. The day was created in order to draw attention to the impact that HIV is having on Native people, and create an opportunity to commit resources and energy to ending this epidemic—both from the community side and the government side.

At the time when National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day was created, there were other national awareness days that had been diffused, and they have been shown to be an effective method to highlight the epidemic in certain communities. The National Native American HIV/AIDS Prevention Center, Colorado State University and the Inter-tribal Council of Arizona wanted to ensure that Native communities received the benefit of these efforts and the government contribute resources to make it happen. They created the day, but the real efforts were to lobby the CDC to recognize it, support it and dedicate monies to support the creation and diffusion of Native Awareness Day materials.”

I think it’s this history in lobbying and advocacy it took to create National Native HIV/AIDS Awareness Day in the first place that we can rally around this coming March 20 and build our collective strength from the ground up. More than just another awareness day, it’s a time of the year to make the realities of HIV/AIDS real for everyone, not just because of heightened statistics or risks but because our youth are asking us to remember the possibilities for change this day can have if we do make it real. As Shea Norris, member of the National Native HIV/AIDS Youth Council (NNYC-HIV) told me:

“I think part of the day represents being seen—within our communities, tribes, nations and internationally—as Native peoples. It’s a day to remember community members that have been lost and look forward to educating our peoples. It’s also to open discussions and reduce stigmas, taboos, and stereotypes. What I hope this day brings is awareness for not just anybody but for the youth, to give them as much knowledge as possible so that they can take the next step and educate their peers so that their peers can educate the next generation.”

Jessica Danforth is the founder and executive director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Looking for support to advocate for HIV/AIDS issues in your community? Join the Campaign to End AIDS today.

On April 25th 2013, the largest-ever roster of designers and celebrities will come together for Housing Works’ spectacular interior design shopping benefit, Design on a Dime. Located at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, the benefit event will feature 62 of the world’s top interior talent. Each designer will create a room vignette using new, donated merchandise, from the most sought after brands which is then sold for 50 to 70 percent off retail pricing.

All five of this years Co-Chairs, Yetta Banks, Genevieve Gorder, Evette Ríos, Sabrina Soto and Lara Spencer, will lend their design to a room and attend the event to raise funds for Housing Works. Housing Works is a non-profit with a mission to end AIDS and homelessness.

Genevieve Gorder will repeat her collaboration with event sponsor, Valspar Paint to create a colorful room vignette. “As a designer I hope to bring joy into every landscape that I create,” says the HGTV Design Star judge. “I’m proud to support an organization like Housing Works who embodies that same philosophy. They don’t just provide housing throughout New York City. Housing Works creates homes.”

Design on a Dime 2013 will benefit Housing Works’ Hull Street Residence: A new housing development project consisting of 30 permanent units of supportive housing for single, formerly homeless adults living with HIV/AIDS. The Hull Street Residence Project is the first from-the-ground up project for Housing Works since 2001.

Event sponsors include HSBC Private Bank, One King’s Lane, Valspar Paint and returning media sponsor ELLE DECOR.

WHAT: Housing Works 9th annual Design on a Dime Benefit

WHO: Yetta Banks, Genevieve Gorder, Evette Ríos, Sabrina Soto, Lara Spencer and dozens of other top designers and celebrities

WHEN: Ticketed opening night reception and shopping, Thursday, April 25th Free public sale, April 26-27th (10 AM to 6 PM)

WHERE: Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W. 18th St., New York City

BENEFITS: Housing Works Hull Street Residence

TICKETS/INFO: www.housingworks.org/dime

From our friends at NASTAD.

Tell Senators Reid, Mikulski and Shelby to continue critical HIV funding in the FY 13 funding bill!

PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY

BACKGROUND:

~ The Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the government for the remainder of FY2013 does not include $35 million in emergency ADAP funding and $10 million for Part C medical clinics announced by President Obama on World AIDS Day (December 1), 2011.

~ This funding currently is being used by 15 states/territories to provide life-saving medications to individuals living with HIV/AIDS. (AL, AK, CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, MT, NE, NJ, SD, TN, WA, WI, VI)

~ This funding also is supporting key staff at Part C supported HIV clinics nationwide, helping these programs serve more patients.

~ Both the House Subcommittee and Senate Full Committee included this funding in their FY2013 bills, but these bills were not enacted.

~ If funds aren’t restored, it could lead to an estimated 7,920 clients being removed from the ADAP program and many Part C funded HIV clinics reducing services and closing their doors to new patients.

~ We ask that the Senate approve an FY 13 continuing resolution that includes this emergency funding ($35 million for ADAPs and $10 million for Part Cs)

ACTION NEEDED – PLEASE CALL NOW:
Please call Senators Reid, Mikulski and Shelby and tell them to prevent harmful cuts to ADAP and Ryan White Part C. Make these calls today!

Senator Harry Reid: 202-224-3542

Senator Barbara Mikulski: 202-224-4654

Senator Richard Shelby: 202-224-5744

Please call with this message:

The Senate Continuing Resolution must include $35 million in emergency ADAP funding and $10 million to support comprehensive Part C HIV clinics continuing the Fiscal Year 2012 level. This funding is not currently included. This funding is being used by 15 states/territories to provide life-saving medications to individuals living with HIV/AIDS and medical services to people living with HIV nationwide. If funds aren’t restored, it could lead to an estimated 7,920 clients being removed from the ADAP program and some clients would lose access to Part C HIV medical services.

By Dan Frosh for The New York Times

FOUNTAIN, Colo. — Coy Mathis was born a boy. But after just a few years, biology succumbed to a more powerful force.
A buzz cut grew into long hair. Jeans gave way to pink dresses. And the child’s big cheeks trembled with tears when anyone referred to Coy as male.

Halfway through kindergarten, after consulting with doctors, Coy’s parents informed their child’s school that Coy identified as a girl and should be treated as one — whether that meant using feminine pronouns to describe her or letting Coy wear her favorite dresses.

“It became really clear that it wasn’t just about liking pink or feminine things,” said Kathryn Mathis, Coy’s mother, recounting how Coy had anxiety attacks when people treated her as a boy. “It was that she was trying so hard to show us that she was a girl.”

In December, however, when Coy, 6, was a few months into the first grade, the Mathises angrily pulled her out of school after being told that she could no longer use the girls’ bathroom but could instead use a gender-neutral restroom.

A letter from a lawyer for the Fountain-Fort Carson school district explained that “as Coy grows older and his male genitals develop along with the rest of his body, at least some parents and students are likely to become uncomfortable with his continued use of the girls’ restroom.”

Now, Coy’s case is at the heart of legal dispute that is likely to test Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, which expanded protections for transgender people in 2008.

The case is unfolding in this small town just south of Colorado Springs, as other states across the country seek to clarify their policies relating to transgender students.

It is an issue that has become more commonplace in recent years as advocacy groups push to ensure that school districts are more attuned to the needs of transgender children.

According to the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, which has filed a complaint with Colorado’s civil rights division on the Mathises’ behalf, 16 states and the District of Columbia offer some form of legal protections for transgender people.

In many instances, those protections extend to schools, where the most mundane rituals like going to the bathroom and using a locker room can be especially traumatic for transgender students.

These days, even in states where no protections exist, school districts have become more amenable to meting out a solution when a dispute arises, said Michael D. Silverman, the group’s executive director.

Mr. Silverman cited a recent Kansas case handled by his group, in which a 10-year-old biologically male student wanted to be known by a female name and dress like a girl. The school, he said, ultimately agreed.

“In most cases, when you’re dealing with children this age, nobody is usually fussing about this sort of thing,” Mr. Silverman said. “The schools are much more willing to work with families to ensure that their child is successfully integrated.”

Nonetheless, conflicts over gender identity are, understandably, sensitive territory for administrators, transgender students and their families.

Last month in Batesville, Miss., a group of high school students protested after a transgender classmate was permitted to wear women’s clothing. The students felt that their classmate was being given preferential treatment given the school district’s gender-specific dress code, according to local news reports.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education recently issued guidelines on the treatment of transgender students, two years after the legislature passed a law banning discrimination based on gender identity.

The guidelines explain the new law and lay out scenarios that schools might encounter.

“Our primary concern is to make sure that every child has a safe and supportive learning environment,” said Jonathan Considine, a spokesman for the department.

The guidelines point out that deciding how best to handle bathroom access for transgender students can be especially challenging. The department recommended that students be permitted to use bathrooms that conform to the gender they identify with and also suggested that schools create gender-neutral restrooms.

“I have been stunned over the last three years by the explosion of concerns and interest and outreach coming from educational professionals around transgender issues,” said Eliza Byard, the executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Still, gay and transgender advocates say transgender students, while typically a small minority, are particularly vulnerable to bullying and harassment.

In a 2012 study by Dr. Byard’s organization, many elementary school students reported hearing comments from fellow students about how both boys and girls should act and look.

About a third of teachers surveyed said that elementary school students who did not conform to gender norms would feel uncomfortable at their schools.

The Mathis case has drawn particular attention, advocates said, because Coy is so young and the Colorado school district had clashed with her parents over what was best.

In that case, the state’s civil rights division is looking into whether the district violated Colorado law by prohibiting Coy from using the girls’ bathroom.

A lawyer for the district, Kelly Dude, declined to comment. In recent public statements, the school district criticized the Mathises for widely publicizing Coy’s situation while it was under review and said it had acted “reasonably and fairly” in the matter.

In a letter to Mr. Silverman, Mr. Dude wrote that Coy was allowed to wear girls’ clothing to school and was referred to as female, as the Mathises had requested. Though Coy could no longer use the girls’ restroom at her elementary school, Mr. Dude said she still had access to staff bathrooms and a gender-neutral restroom in the school’s “health room.”

Mr. Silverman countered that the school district was, he said, “punishing a little girl for what may or may not happen down the road.”

At the Mathises’ home along a stretch of rolling hills, Coy’s parents said they were still mystified over what prompted the school district to change its mind, especially because school administrators seemed so supportive at first.

“It didn’t make any sense to me,” said Jeremy Mathis, a stocky Marine veteran and Coy’s father, noting that Coy had made plenty of friends and grown noticeably happier since identifying as a girl.

“This is elementary school, and you’re singling out this one kid and saying she has to use a special bathroom?”

In the meantime, Coy and her sister and brother — they are triplets — are being home-schooled. While torn about it, the Mathises said they would not return them to school until Coy is allowed to use the girls’ bathroom again.

In the backyard, Coy played happily with her bike, dirt dusting her face and her pink, sparkly boots. She said she would rather be back in school with her friends but knows why she is not.

“They’re being mean to me,” she said. “And they’re telling me that I’m a boy when I’m really a girl.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Join the fight! Join the Campaign to End AIDS!

On April 25th 2013, the largest-ever roster of designers and celebrities will come together for Housing Works’ spectacular interior design shopping benefit, Design on a Dime. Located at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, the benefit event will feature 62 of the world’s top interior talent. Each designer will create a room vignette using new, donated merchandise, from the most sought after brands which is then sold for 50 to 70 percent off retail pricing.

All five of this years Co-Chairs, Yetta Banks, Genevieve Gorder, Evette Ríos, Sabrina Soto and Lara Spencer, will lend their design to a room and attend the event to raise funds for Housing Works. Housing Works is a non-profit with a mission to end AIDS and homelessness.

Genevieve Gorder will repeat her collaboration with event sponsor, Valspar Paint to create a colorful room vignette. “As a designer I hope to bring joy into every landscape that I create,” says the HGTV Design Star judge. “I’m proud to support an organization like Housing Works who embodies that same philosophy. They don’t just provide housing throughout New York City. Housing Works creates homes.”

Design on a Dime 2013 will benefit Housing Works’ Hull Street Residence: A new housing development project consisting of 30 permanent units of supportive housing for single, formerly homeless adults living with HIV/AIDS. The Hull Street Residence Project is the first from-the-ground up project for Housing Works since 2001.

Event sponsors include HSBC Private Bank, One King’s Lane, Valspar Paint and returning media sponsor ELLE DECOR.

WHAT: Housing Works 9th annual Design on a Dime Benefit

WHO: Yetta Banks, Genevieve Gorder, Evette Ríos, Sabrina Soto, Lara Spencer and dozens of other top designers and celebrities

WHEN: Ticketed opening night reception and shopping, Thursday, April 25th Free public sale, April 26-27th (10 AM to 6 PM)

WHERE: Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W. 18th St., New York City

BENEFITS: Housing Works Hull Street Residence

TICKETS/INFO: www.housingworks.org/dime

From our friends at the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition

Greetings!

As part of our ongoing efforts, the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition (NBGMAC) is working to increase knowledge and awareness about the communication habits of Black gay men. As part of this work, we have launched a survey to better understand how Black gay, bisexual and same-gender loving men use the Internet to communicate and receive national health policy and advocacy information. This survey will contribute to our understanding of how to effectively leverage the Internet for outreach and engagement around health information and national policy issues of importance to the Black gay community.

If you are a Black gay, bisexual or same-gender loving man, please take a moment to complete the brief survey and share with your networks. If not, please also consider sharing with any colleagues, friends or loved ones who may be willing to participate and help us to shed light on the communication, health information, and policy and advocacy needs of this underserved community. Sample text for sharing the survey via email, Facebook, and Twitter are provided below. Please feel free to modify before sending them to your networks.

To complete the survey, click here or copy and paste the survey’s URL: http://svy.mk/15KFMwc

Thank You,

Venton Jones, MS
Communications and Education Manager
National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition

Please also spread the word!

SAMPLE EMAIL:

Hello:

The National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition (NBGMAC) recently launched a survey to better understand how Black gay, bisexual and same-gender loving men use the Internet to communicate and receive national health policy and advocacy information. The survey will contribute to understanding how to effectively leverage the Internet for outreach and engagement around health information and national policy issues of importance to the Black gay community.

Please consider sharing with any colleagues, friends or loved ones who may be willing to participate and help shed light on the communication, health information, and policy and advocacy needs of this underserved community. If you are a Black gay, bisexual or same-gender loving man, please take a moment to complete the brief survey.

If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact Venton Jones at ventonjones@NBGMAC.org

Thank you,

[Insert Name]

SAMPLE FACEBOOK POSTS:

Black gay and bisexual men: We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts on how you use the Internet to access health information and learn about policy issues affecting your community: http://svy.mk/15KFMwc.

Black gay, bisexual, or same-gender loving man? If so, we want to hear from you! Share your thoughts on how you use the Internet to access health information and learn about policy issues affecting your community: http://svy.mk/15KFMwc.

We need Black gay and bisexual men to take this survey. Share your thoughts on how you use the Internet to access health information and learn about policy issues affecting your community: http://svy.mk/15KFMwc.

Black gay and bisexual needed to share their thoughts using the Internet to access health information and learn about policy issues affecting their community. Take a moment to share your thoughts: http://svy.mk/15KFMwc.

SAMPLE TWITTER POSTS:

Are you a #Black #gay #bisexual #SGL man? We want to hear from you! RETWEET: http://svy.mk/15KFMwc.@NBGMAC

New survey on the #comm habits of #Black #gay #bisexual #SGL men. We want to hear from you! RETWEET http://svy.mk/15KFMwc. @NBGMAC

From The Huffington Post – Healthy Living

People with well-controlled HIV through antiretroviral therapy have no higher risk of dying than people without HIV, according to a new study in the journal AIDS.

The study included 3,300 people with HIV with an average age of 43, who were on antiretroviral therapy and had undetectable HIV levels and high levels of CD4+ immune cells. Most of the participants were men.

Researchers followed up three years later with the study participants, and found that 62 of them had died. However, nearly all of the deaths were from non-HIV related causes: 31 percent were from sudden death or heart disease, and 19 percent were from cancers not related to HIV. Only 3 percent of the deaths (two deaths, to be exact) were actually from AIDS.

Researchers found that those whose CD4+ cell counts were lower than the general population had an increased risk of death. But people with HIV whose CD4+ counts were normal (a “normal” level is considered 500 to 1,000 cells/mm3), there was no significantly increased death risk.

“Our data support the importance of early diagnosis and treatment to improve clinical outcomes and it is likely that much of the excess mortality associated with HIV would be preventable with timely diagnosis of HIV and initiation of ART,” study researcher Dr. Alison Rodger, of the University College London, said in a statement.

According to a study published late last year in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, deaths from HIV have gone down for most people between 1993 and 2007. However, the study also showed that poor people and black women did not experience such significant declines in HIV-related deaths, HealthDay reported.

Click through to the original article for an informational slideshow: “10 Things We Learned About HIV in 2012”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Join the fight! Join the Campaign to End AIDS!

On April 25th 2013, the largest-ever roster of designers and celebrities will come together for Housing Works’ spectacular interior design shopping benefit, Design on a Dime. Located at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, the benefit event will feature 62 of the world’s top interior talent. Each designer will create a room vignette using new, donated merchandise, from the most sought after brands which is then sold for 50 to 70 percent off retail pricing.

All five of this years Co-Chairs, Yetta Banks, Genevieve Gorder, Evette Ríos, Sabrina Soto and Lara Spencer, will lend their design to a room and attend the event to raise funds for Housing Works. Housing Works is a non-profit with a mission to end AIDS and homelessness.

Genevieve Gorder will repeat her collaboration with event sponsor, Valspar Paint to create *TK room description. “As a designer I hope to bring joy into every landscape that I create,” says the HGTV Design Star judge. “I’m proud to support an organization like Housing Works who embodies that same philosophy. They don’t just provide housing throughout New York City. Housing Works creates homes.”

Design on a Dime 2013 will benefit Housing Works’ Hull Street Residence: A new housing development project consisting of 30 permanent units of supportive housing for single, formerly homeless adults living with HIV/AIDS. The Hull Street Residence Project is the first from-the-ground up project for Housing Works since 2001.

WHAT: Housing Works 9th annual Design on a Dime Benefit

WHO: Yetta Banks, Genevieve Gorder, Evette Rios, Sabrina Soto, Lara Spencer and dozens of other top designers and celebrities.

WHEN: Ticketed opening night reception and shopping, Thursday, April 25th Free public sale, April 26-27th (10 AM to 6 PM)

WHERE: Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W. 18th St., New York City

BENEFITS: Housing Works Hull Street Residence

TICKETS/INFO: www.housingworks.org/dime

By Donald G. McNeil Jr. for The New York Times

Young men in a state prison for juveniles and professors of library science from the University of South Carolina have joined forces to fight AIDS with a graphic novel.

The work — brief enough to be considered a comic book, but not comic — is called “AIDS in the End Zone.” The drawings were by a professional illustrator, but the plotline and the dialogue were written by incarcerated youths, ages 15 to 19.

One character, Brad Timmerman, a spoiled, rich teenager, loses his starting quarterback spot on the Marina High football team to a newcomer, Marcus Johnson, and conspires to get revenge by pressuring a gorgeous party girl, Maria, to seduce Marcus. Brad knows Maria is infected with H.I.V. and blackmails her into sleeping with Marcus by threatening to expose her. The story does not end happily for anyone — although it does show that, thanks to antiretroviral drugs, life can go on.

AIDS is a big problem in South Carolina. Columbia, the capital, was ranked sixth in the nation in 2010 in AIDS cases per capita — higher than Washington, New York or San Francisco. Young black Southern men who have sex with men are the nation’s highest-risk group.

Libraries need an easy-to-read book explaining AIDS to the young, said Kendra Albright and Karen Gavigan, the professors who guided the project. “What can two middle-aged white women tell African-American teenagers?” Dr. Albright asked rhetorically.

Some aspects of the novel have been questioned at academic conferences, she said. It has no mention of gay sex or prison sex, even though those both are greater H.I.V. risk factors than the teenage heterosexual sex that the novel portrays.

“We want to go into school libraries,” Dr. Albright said. “If we came in with stories about homosexuality in the South, I don’t know that we’d be accepted.”

Click here to read more at the University of South Carolina’s website.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Looking to connect with others fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic in your community? Join the Campaign to End AIDS today!

From our friends at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition

TODAY: National Call-In Day to Stop the Sequester

Tell Congress to stop sequestration now. If you called your Members of Congress yesterday, thank you! If not, be part of NLIHC’s National Call-in Day today.

NLIHC is working hard on Capitol Hill and with the Administration to make sure that sequestration and its damaging effects are minimal and short lived. But, we need your help.

Please join us today, March 7 for a National Call-in Day. Tell your Members of Congress that their choice to sequester funds from HUD and USDA Rural Housing programs is unacceptable and must end immediately.

What to Say to Senators and Representatives:

~ States are about to lose significant funding from HUD programs alone. Unfortunately, these funds cannot be supplanted by state funds. The financial hole that is about to be created is simply too large.
~ In our state, there are already [Insert state figure from NLIHC’s latest research] low income households who are severely rent burdened. Adding thousands of households in need to this total does not represent progress for the people of our state.
~ Congress must immediately chose to stop these harmful impacts for low income households and replace sequestration with a balanced deficit reduction package that includes revenues, before we experience the full effects of housing loss, unemployment and other economic impacts in our state.

To learn more about the negative impact on your state by the sequester’s cuts to various HUD programs, see the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ paper.

To get your Members’ contact information:

1. Call the congressional switchboard toll free at 877-210-5351, or
2. Visit NLIHC’s website and enter your zip code in the Contact Congress box on the right.

When you reach your Member’s office, ask to be connected to his or her housing staffer. After you call, please let us know how the call went by e-mailing us at outreach@nlihc.org.

Make sure your voice is heard! Today, March 7, call your Senators and Representative and remind them that every decision they make is a choice with a real impact. Urge them to choose the needs of low income families who deserve decent and affordable homes over loopholes for the wealthiest Americans.

NLIHC’s sequestration information page is at http://nlihc.org/issues/budget/sequestration

Questions? Comments? Email outreach@nlihc.org.

Thank you for your continued support and action!

By Advocate-in-Chief for HIV Health Reform

Not sure where your state stands on implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion and health insurance marketplaces? We’ll point you to answers!

Under the ACA, middle-income people can purchase health insurance through online marketplaces (AKA “exchanges”). States had until February 15, 2013 to decide which type of exchange they want to operate: one run by the state, operated in partnership with the federal government, or run completely by the federal government. StateHealthFacts.org has a map of state decisions.

In addition, states must decide if they will expand their Medicaid programs to cover all low-income people. You can learn more from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and check out their map. Today, state residents have to fit into certain categories to qualify for Medicaid, such as being totally disabled, a low-income senior, or poor child. The ACA will allow people to qualify based solely on their income, a pathway that will provide coverage for many people with HIV. States continue to announce their intent to expand (or not expand) Medicaid, and the pace of announcements will accelerate as we get closer to January 1, 2014.

Additional Information on State Medicaid Expansion Decisions
Center on Budget & Policy Priorities Medicaid expansion map
More resources from HIVHealthReform.org on Medicaid expansion

Additional Information on State Marketplace Decisions
Kaiser State Health Facts map of state exchange types
Documents and information on exchange implementation in every state (www.statereforum.org)
Check out this webinar on exchanges from HIVHealthReform.org (Read the slides or watch the recording)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Take action today! Join the Campaign to End AIDS!

Photo: Will Borse/IRIN

From IRIN, humanitarian news and analysis – a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

BOMET, 25 February 2013 (PlusNews) – A small team of HIV/AIDS activists is trailing Kenyan presidential candidates as they crisscross the country, pressing them to increase their commitment to the care and treatment of people living with HIV.

With just days until what is likely to be a close election, the activists are saying they can help deliver votes from many of the more than one million Kenyans living with HIV to the candidates most willing to address their concerns.

The 17 activists, who come from a range of civil society organizations, are calling on each of the eight presidential candidates to sign a manifesto guaranteeing a scale-up of HIV-testing, the elimination of mother-to-child transmission, and accelerated rollout of antiretroviral therapy (ART). After publishing their demands, the activists hit the campaign trail; they are prepared to dog candidates and disrupt rallies to secure those commitments.

Forgotten

“Many leaders, they do forget about us,” said Loise Wanjiku, an HIV-positive woman from southwestern Kenya, where she says drug shortages are inhibiting the treatment of opportunistic infections associated with HIV.

Wanjiku was one of 17 activists who showed up at a recent rally by Prime Minister Raila Odinga – one of the frontrunners in the presidential race – in Bomet, Rift Valley Province, an hour and a half from her home.

“They’ve been attending campaign rallies from all the candidates to raise their voices, to hold up signs, to chant… and to try to urge the candidates to do more and say more about HIV, based on the demands in the manifesto,” said Paul Davis, the director of global campaigns for Health Global Access Project (Health GAP), a US-based activist group.

Kenya faces a funding gap for its HIV programmes estimated at $1.67 billion. And although the country has steadily increased the number of people on ART, more than 100,000 HIV-positive Kenyans who need the drugs have no access to them.

Yet the presidential candidates have largely been silent on the issue.

In the country’s first-ever presidential debate, hosted in early February, HIV/AIDS was not mentioned until the last question, when candidates addressed it as part of the broader need for improvements in health care. In the two leading candidates’ coalition manifestos, the proposed response to HIV is even less detailed: Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee Coalition mentions HIV/AIDS patients as part of the plan for universal healthcare. Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s Coalition for Reforms and Democracy does not mention HIV at all.

Promises

The rally in Bomet was the first major success of the AIDS activists’ campaign. Positioning themselves around the speaker’s platform with a range of hand-drawn posters, the organizers threatened to interrupt Odinga if he did not mention HIV within the first half of his speech. He responded by promising free ART to all HIV-positive Kenyans and pledging to increase the health budget to 15 percent, as African leaders promised in the Abuja Declaration in 2001.

HIV-positive people are “part of our society”, Odinga told the massive crowd, adding that “we all deserve to be healthy”. Odinga’s team said he did not feel pressured by the activists, but welcomed the opportunity to interact with them.

The activists staged a similar demonstration at a Kenyatta campaign two days later in Kisii, but the candidate failed to address them. They are hopeful, however, that he will eventually respond to their demands based on his record – when Kenyatta was finance minister in 2009, he signed an agreement to increase overall health funding by 40 percent by 2013.

A Kenyatta campaign spokesperson said the team is putting together a detailed HIV/AIDS response plan, which they will release before the election.

At a rally earlier this month, Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi, another presidential candidate, promised more funding for the health sector, saying the “nation needs healthy people to run it”.

Health GAP’s Davis said Odinga’s promise has potential implications for the campaign. “Now the ball is in the court of the Jubilee candidates… to see if they’re going to step up or run the risk of losing [the votes of] 1.6 million people with HIV, their families, their friends, their loved ones, their co-workers.”

He said HIV patients were prepared to transcend the ethnic affiliations that often determine voting patterns in Kenya and vote instead for the candidate most likely to respond to their needs. In Wanjiku’s case, Odinga’s rally helped her make up her mind. Because he was the first candidate to commit to meeting the activists’ demands, he won her vote.

“They want somebody who will care for them,” she said. “Not a tribe, but a person who is caring.”

From our friends at the Coalition on Human Needs

In 3 days new federal cuts will begin to take effect.

But these senseless cuts do not have to happen.

Learn and Act:

~ Learn: White House Conference Call Special for CHN: 3:00 p.m. ET Wednesday, 2/27:
Hear Martha Coven, White House Office of Management and Budget, explain sequestration implementation and the Administration’s work to prevent sequestration.
Phone Number: 800-230-1096
Call Title: White House Update Call with the Coalition on Human Needs

~ Act: The Senate will vote Thursday on legislation to prevent harmful cuts. Please tell your Senators to vote for the American Family Economic Protection Act.

Thousands of you have written to Congress to say NO to mindless cuts. Thank you so much! But here’s why you need to contact the Senate before Thursday:

The cuts that will be triggered March 1 will be painful – details below. There are only two good alternatives: just cancel them, or replace them with a combination of new revenues and sensible savings. There seems to be no possibility at the moment of simply canceling the cuts. But the Senate Democrats’ bill, the American Family Economic Protection Act, follows the SAVE for All principles by stopping all the cuts to domestic programs through the end of 2013 and replacing them by imposing a minimum tax on millionaires, closing some corporate tax loopholes, making cuts to the Pentagon but in a more thoughtful way, and getting savings by ending certain farm subsidies.

What will happen: On Thursday, February 28, the Senate will vote on the Democrats’ bill and one to be proposed by Senate Republicans.* For either to pass, 60 votes will be needed – that means either has to have at least some bipartisan support. Right now, no one predicts either bill will pass. So the mindless cuts will start.

And then: This is not the end of the story. Some cuts will start to take effect fairly quickly, but many will require advance notice (like 30 days’ notice before starting to furlough federal workers). Congress can prevent most of the cuts if it really gets to work to resolve the problem. The next big brinksmanship deadline is March 27, when a temporary spending bill expires. If Congress does not extend that spending, government will shut down. Preventing that and fixing the mindless cuts is likely to be rolled up together – and your voice is essential to prevent damaging cuts from being part of the final deal.

So that is why we need you to contact your Senators now – and to write Letters to the Editor to keep the cuts in the public eye. Please join with us to get many thousands more to voice their outrage and dismay over the coming days that WIC food would be denied to 600,000 children and mothers, at least 4 million meals to seniors won’t be delivered, education for poor children would take a hit, long-term unemployed would see reduced unemployment checks, and thousands of workers would lose jobs or face reduced pay – and this and much more would be done solely because some in Congress refuse to close even a single tax loophole or limit unfair advantages for the rich and big corporations.

Some are counting on your silence. Some Republicans are hoping that because the cuts will not start up instantly people will forget about them. They are hoping that instead of preventing harmful cuts, Congress will just agree to rearrange them. (The Senate Republican alternative to the indiscriminate cuts about to happen may be to give the Pentagon – or maybe domestic agencies too – authority to make the cuts as they see fit. There may be some value to the Pentagon to get that authority, because they do have some room to cut. But for domestic programs, funding is so tight that giving agencies the leeway to spare some programs will just mean other important services will be slashed more deeply.) We need to tell Congress that rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is not our idea of a solution.

On March 1, If nothing is done, many hundreds of thousands of people will be hurt by across-the-board cuts to education, job training, home heating assistance, public health, and social services, to name only a few areas. You can see a sampling of the impact in fact sheets for every state and for the U.S. (This page also includes 50-state tables by issue area and new state data from the Obama Administration)

Examples of senseless cuts: Up to 125,000 families and 100,000 formerly homeless people losing their housing (or having to pay much more), 600,000 young children and moms losing WIC nutrition aid, 70,000 children denied Head Start, nearly 76,000 people with disabilities losing Voc. Rehabilitation services, 373,000 adults and children with serious mental illness losing treatment.

These fact sheets provide powerful reasons why Congress should stop the mindless cuts. Your voice is needed. Click here for a simple way to be heard.

*Note: the Coalition on Human Needs is a non-partisan organization. But the only way to describe what is going on in Congress now is to indicate the positions of most Democrats and Republicans. We recognize that some Republicans have voiced willingness to consider revenue increases and to find Pentagon savings, and we are anxious to support such positions.

Thanks!

From our friends at the Coalition on Human Needs

In 9 days…

On March 1, new federal cuts will begin to take effect. If nothing is done, many hundreds of thousands of people will be hurt by across-the-board cuts to education, job training, home heating assistance, public health, and social services, to name only a few areas. You can see a sampling of the impact in fact sheets for every state and for the U.S. Such as: Up to 125,000 families and 100,000 formerly homeless people losing their housing (or having to pay much more), 600,000 young children and moms losing WIC nutrition aid, 70,000 children denied Head Start, nearly 76,000 people with disabilities losing Voc. Rehabilitation services, 373,000 adults and children with serious mental illness losing treatment.

These fact sheets provide powerful reasons why Congress should stop the mindless cuts. Your voice is needed. Click here for a simple way to be heard.

It is very possible that Congress will not come up with an alternative by March 1, and the sequestration cuts will begin. Many believe that a final resolution will fold decisions about these cuts into decisions that must be made by March 27, when a temporary spending bill expires. That’s a high-stakes deadline: most areas of government will shut down if spending is not approved for the rest of the fiscal year. That’s why your letter to Congress continues to be extremely important. Members of Congress will only agree to protect human needs programs, raise revenues, and make sensible savings in the Pentagon, if they hear from constituents saying that’s the right thing to do. Click here to send letters to your Rep. and Senators.

Background:
Remember the new year’s fiscal showdown? Congress acted at the last minute to replace two months of these cuts with a combination of revenues and other spending reductions. That’s why we’re now facing the March 1 deadline. (For a brief backgrounder, see CHN Human Needs Report, February 11.)

Stark Choices. The President and Senate leadership want new revenues from corporations and wealthy individuals to play a big part in replacing the mindless cuts. They – and we – don’t want to substitute other harmful cuts to Medicaid, SNAP/food stamps, or other vital programs. To those in Congress who say “no more revenues,” we must ask “Is protecting every single tax loophole that benefits corporations and high-income individuals a higher priority than preventing cuts that will affect health, education and job opportunities for millions of Americans?”

To those who would protect every Pentagon program, we must ask “Would you keep funding costly and outdated weapons and equipment while cutting job training, housing, college aid, and child welfare or mental health services?”

The public made clear in November and beyond that they believed people at the top should pay more of their share to resolve the nation’s fiscal problems. Because public opinion was so strong, Congress increased revenues. That public will is still there – a new poll commissioned by Americans for Tax Fairness shows two-thirds of voters say the richest two percent and large corporations should pay more in taxes, and oppose cuts in vital programs.

You can show that constituents not only hold those beliefs, but will tell Congress about them. Just send this email to your senators and rep – not a heavy lift, but pretty important!

Thanks so much.

For Immediate Release
Contact: media@gnpna.org

GNP+NA notes with sadness and disappointment the dissolution of the National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA).

NAPWA was founded 30 years ago, shortly after the meeting where the seminal “Denver Principles” self-empowerment manifesto was written and adopted by people living with AIDS. Since then, NAPWA played an important role in fostering HIV positive leadership and advocating on behalf of people living with HIV/AIDS.

While we salute the historical role of NAPWA and valuable work done by those who were part of NAPWA over the years, we also know that the organization often struggled to fulfill its mission to be an effective national voice of and for people living with HIV/AIDS.

As the North American affiliate of the Global Network of People living with HIV/AIDS, GNP+NA believes that the closing of NAPWA must be the impetus for a far-ranging participatory discussion that re-imagines and strengthens PLWHA organizing and leadership in the United States.

One of the first steps must be a full, honest and transparent explanation of the circumstances and actions leading to NAPWA’s closure. Like others in the AIDS community, we have recently been made aware of troubling issues that appear to have led to the bankruptcy. Any tax-exempt group that has raised and spent tens of millions in contributions, grants and government funds over the years owes such accountability to the community they purport to represent.

There are now more people than ever living with HIV/AIDS in the US and around the world. While transmission rates have stabilized or even fallen in some communities, other communities are ravaged by an epidemic that continues to grow and rage unchecked.

The need for the meaningful involvement of people living with HIV/AIDS, particularly those from the most vulnerable communities, has never been more critical. Yet the commitment to empowering people with HIV, by those in government, NGOs and civil society, seems to exist more in rhetoric than in reality.

Despite that lack of support, there are countless vibrant and effective HIV positive leaders and activists working at every level of this epidemic from the grassroots to national and global organizations. There are thousands more who are capable of leadership, but who aren’t provided the encouragement, opportunity and support to find their voices.

GNP+NA intends to work with colleagues and committed allies to turn a sad milestone—the closure of one of the very first organizations representing people with HIV—into an essential community dialogue involving the full, rich and exciting diversity of all communities of people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States.

Together we can and must build a stronger, more inclusive, representative, and accountable movement by and for people living with HIV. Because like those early pioneers who met in a hotel room in Denver and wrote a radical manifesto that has been heard around the world, we are still “Fighting for our Lives” and we are fighting for the lives of each other.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Join the fight; join the Campaign to End AIDS.

From our friends at Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

On the heels of President Obama’s State of the Union Speech and in advance of the release of the Administration’s budget, the convening groups of the Federal AIDS Policy Partnership (FAPP) and the Global AIDS Policy Partnership (GAPP) worked together to post a petition to the White House website’s “We the People” section.

Click the link below to sign the petition today! Please share widely!
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/commit-resources-ensure-aids-free-generation/fmbm52sP

As you will see the petition calls on President Obama to fully support funding for an AIDS-free generation.

We have 30 days to get 100,000 signatures to garner a response from the White House.

As you are all well aware there are few advocacy communities as strong as ours, and this is a great opportunity to work together and show the White House that we are serious about ending AIDS in the U.S. and globally, and that our voice is strong.

We ask that you share the petition with your organizations, supporters and grassroots. 100,000 may seem like a daunting goal but with the weight of these communities behind it we should be able to reach and exceed it.

Some in the community are using the hashtags #endaids, #aidsfreegeneration, and #dontcutnow in social media, and we ask that as you push the petition over your own social media channels you consider doing the same.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Thanks!

Katie Lapides Coester
Public Policy Officer
Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation
(202) 407 7122
kcoester@pedaids.org

By Catherine Hanssens, Executive Director, CHLP for The Center for HIV Law & Policy

The President’s Advisory Council on AIDS today [February 7, 2013] voted to approve a resolution calling for federal action against HIV criminalization.

The resolution includes the following recommendations:

1. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) / Centers for Disease Control (CDC) complete a written review regarding opportunities for the creation of specific guidance and incentives to state attorneys general and state departments of health for the elimination of HIV-specific criminal laws and to develop recommendations for approaches to HIV within the civil and criminal justice systems that are consistent with the treatment of similar health and safety risks; and support legislation, such as the REPEAL HIV Discrimination Act, that advances these objectives.

2. Current criminal laws require modernization to eliminate HIV-specific statutes or application of general criminal law that treats HIV status, or the use of condoms or other measures to prevent HIV transmission, as the basis for criminal prosecution or sentence enhancement.

3. Federal and state officials review the HIV-specific convictions and related penalties, sentence enhancements, and other restrictions imposed on people living with HIV, such as mandated sex-offender registration and civil commitment. In the event that such convictions or sentence enhancements fail to conform to the principles outlined above, federal and state officials should take appropriate measures (e.g., executive clemency, pardon, sentence reconsideration, parole, probation) to mitigate the harm caused to individuals.

4. U.S. law should be consistent with current medical and scientific knowledge and accepted human rights-based approaches to disease control and prevention and avoid the imposition of unwarranted punishment based on health and disability status.

5. The CDC should issue a clear statement addressing the growing evidence that HIV criminalization and punishments are counterproductive and undermine current HIV testing and prevention priorities.

It is important to know something about what this resolution does and does not mean. PACHA’s role is to advise the Secretary of HHS and the President; it has no power to order anyone to do anything. Secretary Sebellius and President Obama both have the discretion to ignore the resolution’s recommendations.

So what is the value of the President’s Advisory Council on AIDS (PACHA) Resolution on Ending Federal and State HIV-Specific Criminal Laws, Prosecutions, and Civil Commitments? I believe it is important for several reasons:

1. As the first clear, comprehensive statement of recommendations against HIV criminalization from a federal body, the resolution is an important step in moving federal agencies – from the White House to the CDC – to a more public, active position and related action against criminalization in the United States and abroad.

2. It provides additional impetus for the CDC and the DOJ to issue statements, guidance and incentives that can help to impress state policymakers that there is both a need and federal support for criminal law reform as it affects people living with HIV.

3. It is a very useful advocacy tool for summarizing both the problem of, and several solutions to, HIV criminalization in federal agencies (such as the military and federal prisons).

4. For similar reasons, it is a useful, needed tool for local advocates working with state policymakers to begin the process of modernizing current law and practices.

5. It is a clear and concise document that will be useful for community and policymaker education at many levels, pointing out not just the problem, but also ways that we can begin the process of change and demands that community members can make of federal and state officials.

The work of advocates who pushed for passage of the resolution is not over. But we have passed a major marker on the road to reform and justice for many people and communities affected by HIV.

For the complete text of the PACHA resolution, go to: http://hivlawandpolicy.org/resources/view/824

Campaign to End AIDS members,

If you identify as LGBTQQI, our Co-Chair for this group – Domingo Jimenez – would love to hear from you!

Please fill out this brief survey on obstacles you have encountered; it is available to download below in both English and Spanish. Once you’re done, please return it to Domingo at djimenez.dallasaag@gmail.com. Please share widely!

Not a C2EA member yet? Complete the survey, then click here and join us!

C2EA LGBTQQI Survey (English)
C2EA LGBTQQI Survey (Spanish)

By Erin Allday for The San Francisco Chronicle

Deon was in jail when he tested positive for HIV.

He knew that his long-term girlfriend was HIV-positive, and they hadn’t taken many precautions to keep him safe. So he wasn’t surprised by the diagnosis, but the news was still crushing.

“I was devastated,” said Deon, 32, a San Francisco resident who asked that his last name not be used. “I didn’t know if I was going to live. I didn’t know if my social life was basically over. I didn’t know how I was ever going to have a family.”

Nearly five years later, Deon has a new girlfriend. And this month, she will give birth to their first child – a girl who, like her mother, is not infected with HIV. Deon, whose infection is so well controlled that the virus is undetectable in his blood, will have his family.

“She’s due Feb. 20,” Deon said. “I can’t wait.”

Deon and his girlfriend, Caroline, 24, are both being treated at San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86 HIV/AIDS clinic, through a new program thought to be the first of its kind in the country that caters to straight men who are HIV positive and want to have a family.

The program, called Positive Reproductive Outcomes for Men, is part of the Bay Area Perinatal AIDS Center, which has been helping HIV-positive women give birth to healthy babies for more than a decade. It offers reproductive counseling and care to heterosexual couples, and includes support groups for straight men who are HIV positive.

Having kids now safe

There is no cure for Deon’s HIV infection, but for men and women like him, having children of their own is, finally, a safe option. And it’s further evidence that with the remarkable discovery of drugs to control the virus, a normal, productive life is possible for most people.

“I can’t tell you how much I love this,” said Guy Vandenberg, a nurse in Ward 86. “I love to see the relief on the faces of our patients when they discover this is a topic they can talk about and that there are options for them to have a family.

“A lot of our patients, once they knew they were HIV positive, they just sort of self-censored. They told themselves to stop thinking about family. This is one major step to making life with HIV as close to normal and complete as possible.”

About 500 straight men with HIV are treated at Ward 86, said Dr. Deborah Cohan, medical director of the perinatal center who also is part of the Women’s HIV Program at UCSF. In San Francisco, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has primarily affected gay men, and Cohan said issues like reproduction and pregnancy that affect mostly straight men and women often are overlooked.

Because HIV is an incurable sexually transmitted infection, unprotected sex between “discordant” couples – when one person is infected and the other isn’t – is highly discouraged. Condoms are, and likely always will be, the first line of protection.

Medical advances

But over the past decade, several developments in scientific understanding of HIV and how to prevent infections have resulted in two important results: the ability to prevent an HIV-positive mother from infecting a fetus, and a new technique for preventing the spread of infection from one partner to another.

Scientists now know that people who are HIV positive but are taking antiretroviral drugs and have their infection under control – specifically, those who have a low viral load, or undetectable levels of virus in their blood – are very unlikely to pass the virus on to a partner. Pregnant women who are HIV positive also will not pass the virus on to the fetus if they are on antiretroviral drugs.

In the last two years, scientists also have shown that uninfected people can protect themselves by taking antiretroviral drugs too.

Doctors have put all of that information together to determine that men and women who are HIV positive and want to start a family can safely have sex with the goal of becoming pregnant. There are strict guidelines – most important, the HIV-positive partner must be taking antiretroviral drugs and have a low viral load.

Couples are instructed to have unprotected sex only when the woman is ovulating, and to use condoms at all other times. In some cases, the uninfected partner might also take antiretroviral drugs to offer another layer of protection.

But the key is that it’s possible to have a family, doctors say.

‘A paradigm shift’

“It’s a bit of a paradigm shift,” said Dr. Brad Hare, medical director of Ward 86. “We know now that it’s absolutely safe, in a controlled way, for people to have healthy sex lives that protect their partners and can result in a family.”

Starting a family was not an option for most HIV-infected people in the ’80s and ’90s. The risk of passing the virus on to an uninfected partner – or the child – was too great. Even if a healthy baby was born, most people with HIV died from AIDS within a few years of becoming infected, so they would never be able to raise their children.

The first break in family planning for HIV-infected individuals was the lifting of an adoption ban in the mid-1990s. Around the same time, scientists figured out how to prevent the spread of HIV from infected mothers to fetuses.

In the 2000s, some couples used sperm-washing techniques to get pregnant. The process involves collecting a man’s ejaculate and then separating the sperm from the seminal fluid, which contains the virus. The sperm is then injected directly into the woman’s uterus. But sperm-washing is expensive and not practical for many couples.

It’s been only in the past two or three years that some doctors have been willing to discuss reproduction and family planning with couples affected by HIV. And still, many doctors aren’t comfortable with it, Cohan said.

“People often have really strong, emotional reactions when they hear about an HIV-infected couple wanting to conceive,” she said. “That’s very scary for providers. We don’t want to feel like we’re somehow enabling an HIV infection. But we have a beautiful opportunity here.”

UCSF survey

Researchers at UCSF are conducting a survey of HIV-negative women with HIV-positive male partners about their thoughts on reproduction and family planning. Participants must be between ages 18 and 49. To take the survey, go to http://svy.mk/XkUwNw.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: eallday@sfchronicle.com

For Immediate Release: February 6, 2013

Contact:
Kyle Murphy – (202) 483-6622 ext. 3330; kmurphy@nmac.org
Sunny Bjerk – (212) 966-0466 ext. 1108; s.bjerk@housingworks.org

Washington, DC – As the nation prepares to mark National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (NBHAAD) on February 7, the National Minority AIDS Council (NMAC) and Housing Works, with support from the Ford Foundation, have released a new report titled “Mass Incarceration, Housing Instability and HIV/AIDS,” examining the intersection between incarceration, homelessness and HIV vulnerability, especially within the African American community.

African Americans make up only 12 percent of America’s population, but account for 44 percent of new HIV infections and almost half of all AIDS diagnoses in the United States, with black gay men facing the heaviest disease burden of any group. At the same time, despite similar rates of criminal conduct, African American males are more than six times as likely to be incarcerated as their white counterparts. Loss of income, poor health, interruption of intimate relationships, and pre-existing social disadvantages coalesce to make it difficult for many people living with HIV to secure or maintain adequate housing. Histories of incarceration only exacerbate these pressures further.

“While it has long been understood that incarceration increases an individual’s vulnerability to HIV, many have assumed that this is the result of increased risk behavior or exposure while in prison,” said NMAC Director of Legislative and Public Affairs Kali Lindsey. “In reality, the evidence suggests that it is housing instability and the interruption of medical care resulting from incarceration that has the greatest impact on HIV vulnerability. With 25 percent of the world’s imprisoned population, our nation’s culture of mass incarceration has created a devastating and self-perpetuating cycle of poverty, homelessness, and criminal justice involvement that undermines our ability to successfully combat the spread of HIV, especially among African Americans.”

The newly released report includes recommendations to address this cycle of vulnerability, such as:
~ allowing formerly incarcerated persons access to federal housing and homeless assistance programs;
~ removing post-incarceration barriers to subsistence income and health insurance;
~ improving pre-release planning for inmates living with HIV or AIDS; and
~ evaluating the effectiveness of housing-based interventions for formerly incarcerated persons living with HIV.

“With the science we now have on effectively treating people living with HIV or AIDS, as well as preventing its onward transmission, it is all the more urgent that we implement structural interventions that will render the maximum benefit from treatment and prevention,” said Housing Works Vice President of National Advocacy and Organizing Christine Campbell. “This must include not only addressing the housing and health care needs of those leaving the correctional system, but also addressing our system of mass incarceration as a whole.”

The new report, “Mass Incarceration, Housing Instability and HIV/AIDS” can be downloaded online here: http://nmac.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Incarceration-Report-FINAL_2-6-13.pdf.

###

The National Minority AIDS Council (NMAC) represents a coalition of faith, community and AIDS service organizations advocating and delivering HIV/AIDS services in communities of color nationwide. Since 1987, NMAC has developed leadership in communities of color through a variety of advocacy campaigns, public policy education programs, national conferences, research programs, capacity building, technical assistance and trainings, and digital and electronic resource materials. For more information visit www.nmac.org.

Housing Works is a healing community of people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. Our mission is to end the dual crises of homelessness and AIDS through relentless advocacy, the provision of lifesaving services, and entrepreneurial businesses that sustain our efforts. For more information, visit www.housingworks.org.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Ready to get active?? Join the Campaign to End AIDS today to connect with other passionate activists around the country and demand change now!

By pwnusa in PWN-USA Communications

Feb. 6, 2013

Dear community,

Inspired by global networks of women living with HIV and supported by leaders in the United States, Positive Women’s Network (PWN) was officially founded by 28 diverse women living with HIV in June of 2008. Its purpose was to create a unified voice and building collective power for HIV-positive women across the United States. When PWN was founded it was with the understanding and goal that one day it would transition from WORLD, an organization which provided a structural umbrella for U.S. Positive Women’s Network to establish itself as an independent organization, in its own right.

That day has come. PWN founding members, Steering Committee members, Advisory Group members and our regional leaders have decided to embark on a new path, a fresh start, in order to fulfill our original mission, advance HIV-positive women’s autonomy, and strengthen our accountability to our national constituency. Our fresh start includes a new name, logo and website, and the same inspiration and vision that has always guided us.

Effective immediately, our name is Positive Women’s Network of the United States of America (PWN-USA).

As PWN-USA, we will continue to represent and advocate for women living with HIV in the United States and remain a part of the national and global People Living with HIV (PLHIV) movement. While we have collectively accomplished much over the last several years, we hold the same values and mission that inspired us to join forces on behalf of women living with HIV in 2008.

PWN’s leadership remains privileged to serve, lead and represent HIV-positive women in the U.S. We rely on the collective strength of our members and allies to support us as we start a new chapter in the development of PWN-USA. We will be issuing a call for all HIV-positive women across the nation to provide input on our new logo, the development of our new PWN-USA website and our 2013-2014 strategic planning process. We encourage you to join us. We can be reached at positivewomensnetworkUSA@gmail.com.

Thank you in advance for your continued support, guidance, and mentorship.

In sisterhood and solidarity,

PWN-USA leadership

Dawn Averitt
Dee Borrego
Gina Brown
Barb Cardell
Sharon Decuir
Yolanda Diaz
Cathy Elliott
Jane P. Fowler
Kat Griffith
Andrea L’amour Harrington
Margot Isaacs
Vanessa Johnson
Loren Jones
Pat Kelly
Naina Khanna
Barbara Marcotte
Pat Migliore
LaTrischa Miles
Sonia Rastogi
Linda H. Scruggs
Nicole Seguin
Waheedah Shabazz-El
Teresa Sullivan
Evany Turk
Juanita Williams

Spring forward with fashion, furniture, and artwork finds at the Housing Works semi-annual Best of Spring sales event! We have re-stocked our shops with top-quality seasonal merchandise for a fraction of the retail price. This year THIRTEEN is your lucky number with sales in bloom at all of our shops and online at shophousingworks.org!

Spring 2013 featured goodies include:

Mary Quant London Union Jack Trench
Retail: $165 Best of:$85

Nanette Lapore Floral Jacket
Retail $325 Best of: $85

Candela Contrast Wedges
Retail: $281 Best of: $65

DVF Canvas Contrast Hobo
Retail: $325 Best of: $75

Marc by Marc Jacobs Cardigan
Retail: $175 Best of: $65
Iceberg Graphic Tee
Retail: $75 Best of: $35
DL1961 Red Jeans
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WHEN AND WHERE

Soho, 130 Crosby St.
Saturday, March 2, 12-8pm

Upper East, 202 East 77th St.
Tuesday, March 5, 5pm to 8pm

Chelsea, 143 West 17th St.
Thursday, March 7, 5pm to 8pm

Yorkville, 1730 2nd Ave.
Saturday, March 9, 12am to 8pm

Columbus & 74th, 306 Columbus Ave.
Tuesday, March 12, 5pm to 8pm

Gramercy, Thursday, 157 East 23rd St.
Thursday, March 14, 5pm to 8pm

West Village, 245 West 10th St.
Saturday, March 16, 12am to 8pm

Hell’s Kitchen, 730-732 9th ave.
Tuesday, March 19, 5-8pm

Tribeca, 119 Chambers St.
Thursday, March 21, 5pm to 8pm

Brooklyn Heights, 122 Montague St.
Saturday, March 23, 12pm to 8pm

96th and Broadway, 2569 Broadway
Thursday, March 28, 5pm-8pm

Park Slope, 266 5th avenue
Saturday, March 30, 12pm-8pm

shophousingworks.org
March 11-25

In BBC News: Health

Scientists say they have, for the first time, worked out the pattern of spread of hepatitis C, showing early diagnosis is key to preventing epidemics.

A study in injecting drug users in Greece indicated that each infected person spread the disease to 20 others – 10 of these in the first two years.

The researchers said their results would help tackle the disease’s spread.

Globally up to 180 million people live with the virus, most are unaware that they have it.

Those infected do not develop symptoms for up to 20 years and spread it to others without realising.

Study leader Dr Gkikas Magiorkinis, from Oxford University, said when people were infected with something such as flu it was very easy to work out where it had come from, because people knew they were infected within days.

But with hepatitis C, no-one has been able to pin down how the virus spreads, because cases occur months or years apart.

Genetic signature

To overcome this problem, the researchers looked at four hepatitis C epidemics in Greece, using data from 943 patients collected between 1995 and 2000.

But to provide more detail on how it spreads, they also included genetic information on the virus taken from 100 samples.

Plugging the details into a computer model, they calculated that injecting drug users were “super-spreaders”, each transmitting the virus to 20 other people.

Most importantly they discovered that most of the transmissions occurred in the first couple of years, they report in PLoS Computational Biology.

The researchers said that people were more infectious at in the early days of catching hepatitis C because they had higher levels of virus.

The evidence they have produced suggests programmes targeting the diagnosis and treatment of hepatitis C in high-risk groups as early as possible would prevent many new infections and associated health care costs many years down the line.

About 20% of those infected will develop cancer or liver scarring after 20 years of infection, at which point the only treatment is liver transplantation, which costs about £100,000 ($160,000).

Dr Magiorkinis, who did the work in collaboration with the University of Athens and Imperial College London, said the model had helped build a “solid argument” to improve early diagnosis and antiviral treatment in drug users.

“Working out how many people are likely to be infected by each super-spreader of Hepatitis C, as well as how soon they will be infected, has been a puzzle for over 20 years,” he said.

“Our research has resolved this issue and paves the way for a modelling study to show what kind of public health interventions could really make a difference.”

He added the approach could be useful in other infections such as HIV.

Charles Gore, chief executive of The Hepatitis C Trust and president of the World Hepatitis Alliance, said: “This study is potentially very important.

“If we are better able to identify where the majority of transmission is happening in many Western countries, we will be able to improve and more cost effectively target interventions.

“It needs to be said, however, that globally hepatitis C is not ‘a drug users’ disease.

“Of the 150 million people living with the virus, only about 10 million are people who inject drugs, according to The Lancet. The vast majority of infections are the result of unsafe healthcare and we equally need to target prevention there.”

An action alert from our friends at the Positive Justice Project and the Prevention Justice Alliance!

End HIV Criminalization: Sign the Positive Justice Project Consensus Statement! Sign on by Wednesday, FEBRUARY 6!

Why the deadline? Because on February 7, the President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) will be considering a resolution urging the federal government to take concrete action steps to eliminate HIV criminalization. We need as many individuals and organizations as possible to sign on to the Consensus Statement to show PACHA that activists demand action to end HIV criminalization.

The Positive Justice Project (PJP) Consensus Statement on the Criminalization of HIV in the United States calls on federal and state officials to modernize criminal laws and policies and to eliminate HIV-specific statutes. It is the first national consensus statement against HIV criminalization in the United States, endorsed by a diverse group of activists and professionals from a broad range of backgrounds.

The PJP Consensus Statement highlights injustices caused by HIV criminalization and includes clear rationales, both scientific and legal, for why change is overdue.

The PJP Consensus Statement calls for government action to make sure that any prosecution based on exposure to a sexually transmitted disease, including but not limited to HIV, requires:

1. Proof that the defendant (the person charged) intended to do harm;
2. Conduct that is likely to result in that harm;
3. Proof that the conduct of the accused in fact resulted in that harm; and
4. Punishment that is proportionate to the actual harm the defendant caused.

Read the entire PJP Consensus Statement and CLICK HERE to endorse the statement on behalf of yourself or your organization.

Learn more about the Positive Justice Project.

By Beth Roth for Out & About Newspaper

Street Works, a local provider of counseling, outreach, education and care to those infected and affected by HIV and AIDS, is launching a new program, Project UNO. UNO stand for U. New. Outstanding.

“Project UNO is Street-Works’ new SAMSHA grant program serving the population of young gay men battling substance abuse addiction with a heavy emphasis on prevention and care of those infected and affected with HIV,” explains David Long, the project coordinator of UNO. “This new program aims to uplift and inspire today’s generation of young men with useful tips to sustain life after an positive HIV diagnosis. Potential clients do not need to be HIV-positive to get services. HIV-negative men will be educated on prevention and wellness to ensure an more powerful life. Clients will learn the strengths of journaling and sober social networking to empower their life.”

Clients are then monitored for six months and encouraged to focus on five fundamentals for successfully moving forward with their lives: sobriety, strength, status, self-purpose and safety.

As the program coordinator, Long oversees and develops treatments plans for all clients. He also recruits and identifies clients “via various platforms including colleges, social club settings and the Internet.”

In addition to reaching out to clients, Project UNO seeks to change the hearts and minds of not only those facing HIV and AIDS, but the community as well.

“Project UNO aims to change the perception of young gay men by emboldening them to be stronger in their community, and stronger in their daily lives,” Long said. “I am asking the community, and churches in particular, to bring awareness that gay men are ‘regular’ men and should not be looked down upon due to their sexuality.”

Street Works was founded in 1997 by executive director Ron Crowder as a mobile outreach agency. They target youth, drug users, incarcerated persons, sex industry workers, and those engaged in other high-risk activities.

Through an aggressive program combining on-site counseling, a mobile outreach clinic/outreach center, community footwork, and home visits, Street Works combats HIV and AIDS where it most disproportionately affects American society: in the most economically disadvantaged communities.

Street Works provides education, prevention and care to those infected, affected or both by HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases on the inner city streets of Nashville. They are the only such agency to operate a 24-hour emergency help line and 24-hour on-call counseling in Davidson County.

For more information about Street Works and Project UNO, visit their website www.street-works.org, visit their counseling centers at 2015 25th Ave. N. 37208, 83 University Court 37210, or 520 Sylvan St. 37206. You can also contact them through their 24-hour help line: (615) 259-7676.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Get involved with C2EA partners like these around the country – JOIN the Campaign to End AIDS today!

By NNAAPC for Indian Country Today Media Network

National Native American AIDS Prevention Center (NNAAPC) realesed the following press release to commend the CDC report that raises awareness of the need to close the gap in treatment disparity, specifically among Native people. The NNAAPC helps organizations that serve Native communities to plan, develop and manage HIV/AIDS prevention, intervention, care and treatment programs.

In 2011, Gardner, et.al. released research findings regarding the state of HIV care and treatment in America, and the gaps that exist in working with those people living with HIV to benefit from modern biomedical and treatment options. Out of all of the individuals with HIV in the U.S., only 80% are aware of their status, 62% have been linked to care, 41% stay in care, 36% get antiretroviral therapy, and only 28% are able to achieve an undetectable viral load through medication adherence. The disturbing results have been widely disseminated and are now commonly referred to as the “treatment cascade”. The treatment cascade coupled with research demonstrating that viral suppression through medication adherence is one of the most effective HIV prevention strategies available and has changed the face of HIV and AIDS prevention in the America. The current focus is shifting to the importance of biomedical interventions and ensuring that people living with HIV or newly diagnosed are linked to stable systems of care and disease maintenance.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on a supplemental surveillance report in January 2013 titled Monitoring Selected National HIV Prevention and Care Objectives by Using HIV Surveillance Data—United States and 6 U.S. Dependent Areas—2010. This report details important statistics on linkage to care, retention in care and viral suppression—all of which are leading health indicators for people living with HIV and are now indicators of successful prevention and treatment efforts. Data were collected from 14 U.S. jurisdictions (Delaware, District of Columbia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, California [San Francisco], South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wyoming). This sample, while not encompassing all areas within the U.S., is geographically diverse and includes some very large American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian populations.

“The CDC should be applauded for releasing these data during this time of shifting prevention priorities,” said Robert Foley, President/CEO of the National Native American AIDS Prevention Center. “However, the disparity continues to grow and this report should serve as a call to action for all parties working for the health and wellness of American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian people. HIV and AIDS in America cannot be eradicated and there is no hope of ‘reaching zero’ if these trends are left unaddressed.”

According to the report, American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians are not accessing or receiving the care and attention that they require to in order to maintain their health after an HIV diagnoses.

~ Only 0.4% of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) and 0.1% of Native Hawaiian individuals (13 years or older) that tested positive for HIV during 2010 were linked to medical care within 3 months after their diagnosis. This is compared to 50.6%, 32.8%, and 11.9% for Black/African Americans, Whites, and Hispanic/Latinos, respectively.

~ Only 0.3% of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) and 0.1% of Native Hawaiian individuals (13 years or older) that were diagnosed with HIV in 2008 had achieved viral suppression by the end of 2009. This is compared to 44.8%, 38.0%, and 13.2% for Black/African Americans, Whites, and Hispanic/Latinos, respectively.

This is an alarming trend. When these statistics are viewed beside the statistics that were released by the CDC in 2012 that stated new HIV infections among AI/AN people increased by 8.7% from 2007 to 2010. It is becoming apparent that changes need to be made and action must be taken in order to meet the needs of Native Americans newly diagnosed and living with HIV.

“Knowing what we know now about how to conduct effective HIV prevention and care, it is shocking to see how few Native people are accessing the care that they need. Hopefully, this report can serve as a call to action,” asserted D’Shane Barnett (Mandan/Arikara), chairman of the National Native American AIDS Prevention Center (NNAAPC). “Governmental organizations and federal decision-makers must pay attention to these trends and realign funding and resources to Native communities in order to ensure that Tribes and Native healthcare systems have the capacity to create and sustain linkage to care programs, that HIV medications are readily available, and that adherence programs and treatment regimens are culturally responsive.”

“Native communities need to examine their internal systems in order to ensure that they have processes and staff in place to work with people who are newly diagnosed to assist them with navigating a potentially confusing systems of care,” stated Mr. Foley. “And there needs to be persistent efforts to combat community-based stigma caused by fear, misinformation, and discrimination. These continue to serve as barriers to people who know they need to access care, but are fearful of the social ramifications of doing so. This report is a new signpost laying out the path that we have to follow.”

The CDC report can be viewed on the CDC website.

By Donald G. McNeil Jr. for The New York Times

A study suggests encouraging drug abusers to use thin syringes, which retain less fluid and the virus it may contain.

Distributing “low-dead-space syringes” to addicts could substantially lessen H.I.V. transmission among them, a new study has estimated.

Syringes have widely varying amounts of “dead space” — the amount of fluid retained even when the plunger is fully depressed, said William A. Zule, a researcher at RTI International and the lead author of the paper in The International Journal of Drug Policy.

Fat ones with interchangeable needles may have 40 times as much dead space as thin ones like those used by diabetics. And simulations of the way addicts draw in blood and rinse with water showed that the biggest syringes can retain 1,000 times as much virus as thinner ones.

Many foreign governments that distribute syringes ignore dead space and buy whatever is cheapest, Dr. Zule said.

Recipients of clean syringes are not supposed to share them, but some do. Users of heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine usually accept thin syringes, the study said. Users of poppy straw extract, homemade stimulants or crushed tablets may not.

The best way to get addicts to demand low-dead-space syringes, Dr. Zule suggested, may be to point out that they get more drug.

“That may not be politically correct, but you need messages that speak to the group you have to work with,” he said.

No human clinical trials have proved that such syringes save lives, but the idea is plausible and switching now would be affordable and safe, Dr. Zule argued.

By Mathew Rodriguez for TheBody.com

Family secrets … betrayed trust … condom usage?

The classic, persistent themes of Spanish-language soap operas, also known as telenovelas, get a refreshing, enthralling update in Sin Vergüenza (Without Shame), the new telenovela that is taking the Internet by storm. Presented in English as well as Spanish, and imagined and realized by California’s vast AltaMed health care network, the aim of the show is to “educate without being educational.” The project is a unique endeavor — it combines a fresh narrative format with the ability to tackle real-world issues such as HIV, stigma, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) issues, family issues, infidelity, shame, aging, dating and more.

TheBody.com was lucky enough to sit down with two of the series’ main actors — JM Longoria III, who plays gay son Enrique Salazar, and Joanna Zanella, who plays doting daughter Christina Salazar. Both are performances not to be missed, and in this interview they discuss the honor of spreading HIV awareness through this project, why timing is essential and what they took away from playing Latinos who are dealing with issues of sexuality, condom usage, HIV and family secrets.

Before you read, make sure to watch Episode 1 of Sin Vergüenza. Stay tuned for three more episodes in the coming weeks — each accompanied by a conversation with key people involved in the production!

Haz clic aquí para ver la telenovela Sin Vergüenza, capítulo 1, en español.

Mathew Rodriguez: How did you hear about this opportunity to get involved with the telenovela, Sin Vergüenza?

Joanna Zanella: I was submitted for it by my agent, and it said it was a theatrical project, and it was for HIV awareness and it was going to be in a telenovela style, so they wanted bilingual actors who could speak perfect English and Spanish. I saw it, and I thought, “Oh my God, I think I should audition for this, because I speak perfect Spanish and perfect English and I think it’s a great opportunity and a great cause to talk about: HIV awareness.” I went into the audition, and that’s where I met Paco [Farias, director of Sin Vergüenza]. I went in with another actor, and I thought I did pretty well, and I got a callback.

At the callback, there was Natalie [Sanchez, AltaMed’s HIV prevention and education program manager], Hilda [Sandoval, manager of the psycho-social services and mental health clinician program at AltaMed], Paco, and a whole bunch of other people, and I actually ended up going in with Eric, who plays Hector, my boyfriend, in Sin Verguenza. And, I think we both did so well. Our chemistry was there from the beginning. When we went in, everybody started laughing when we acted it out. We added on to the actual script, which was great, that Paco let us play with it.

I got the call; they said “You booked the job,” and it was amazing. It was wonderful news. As a Latina actress, getting the opportunity to play the same role in English and Spanish was such a blessing.

JM Longoria III: For me, it was sort of a happy mistake. I ran into a friend the night before the audition, and he was saying there was an audition going on at this casting office, and I was a little hesitant. Typically, your agent should submit you. One of my coworkers convinced me to show up, so I show up to Blanca Valdez’s casting office. They told me I was too young for another role that I was trying to get an audition for. They recommended me to audition for this project, Sin Vergüenza, and I had no idea what it was. I was like, “Well, I’m on my lunch break, I need to go back.” And they said, “Well, you’re next.” So they paired me up with another guy and had me read.

I had no idea what the project was about, or what the context of the scene was. Paco was there, and at the end he said, “Oh my gosh, thank you, this is what I’ve been looking for all day!” And I was like, “Great!” Then I ended up getting the callback, and I had to tell my agent I got a callback for this role that she hadn’t submitted me for — but she had actually submitted me for Hector’s role, which is funny.

At the callback, I just felt so comfortable. We had fun, and thank you Paco for allowing us to kind of improv a little bit more, to add on and bring our own personalities. It’s such a great role for Latinos. It’s bilingual. And playing the gay son who’s in law school in this Mexican-American family, where there are so many taboos and machismo mentality, is wonderful. It’s being put in such a positive light, and it being surrounded by HIV awareness is beautiful. It’s a great project. And I hope this message gets out there and educates the Latino community.

Mathew Rodriguez: It sounds like the HIV awareness aspect of the project made it more attractive to both of you.

JM Longoria III: Oh, definitely. As I continued to find out more and more about the project, I was like, “Wow!” I felt like I had found this gem. As an actor, these are the kinds of project you want to find: doing work that has so much more meaning than something that you can forget about as just one performance.

Joanna Zanella: I’m with JM. When we went to the screening for the first episode on World AIDS Day: Usually, like JM said, when you see your work, it’s an amazing feeling. But when you know it’s for a great cause, it’s a one thousand times better feeling than it is to just be doing something because it’s just a project.

That day, one of the ladies who was a speaker at the event had been living with HIV for 22 years, and she was telling us her story, and I was in tears. This whole time I was in tears because of the strong woman that she was. But what really hit me was that she came up to me, and she hugged me, and she told me, “Thank you so much for doing this, for helping the community understand.” When she said that to me, I just started crying, because, to me, I felt like I really didn’t do anything. It’s such a small thing that I felt that I did. But to other people, they’re really appreciative, because we were able to express real people’s stories in the novela. You get into a character that is actually someone’s life. To me, it’s one of the most amazing projects that I’ve been a part of.

Mathew Rodriguez: Was there ever any hesitation to take on the project because of the subject matter?

JM Longoria III: I know on my end, there was never hesitation. There was only excitement. As I continued finding out more about the project, and reading the script, and seeing the interaction and relationships between each character, it was more exciting. I kept telling my roommates and friends, “I have this cool job! I’m helping to be this voice for this community, and helping to educate! And be almost a spokesperson, in a way.”

There was never any hesitation. And the moment when we all met, we had our first table read with the director, and everything just clicked. It was just magic. And every day on set was just magic. We were supporting each other. I don’t know how to describe it, but it was this amazing energy.

Joanna Zanella: I agree. When I first sat down for the table read with JM and I found out he was going to play my brother, I had actually never worked with JM before, and I’d never met him. When I saw him, I immediately hugged him and said, “Brother!” [Laughs]

JM Longoria III: Right away, we hugged each other, and I was like, “Oh my God, are you my sister?”

Joanna Zanella: I think, between me and JM, there was an amazing connection, because every day that I went into work on set, I truly felt that he was my brother. At lunch, I’d be like, “Bro, do you need something to drink?” “Bro, are you OK?” Even now, after shooting, I still feel that connection with him.

We built great friendships, and I know that, thanks to this project, I got to meet great people — not only JM, but Eliana [Alexander], who played our mom, and Danny [Daniel E. Mora], who played our dad, so it’s been an amazing journey.

JM Longoria III: Yeah, and just watching everyone work day to day, and seeing how much they would give you, it’s just like, “Wow!” As an actor, it’s amazing to see that and learn from them. The project itself was beyond what I could have ever expected from it.

Mathew Rodriguez: There’s a lot going on in the episodes — in a good way: infidelity, condom usage, stigma, LGBT issues, and all centered on the Latino community, specifically the East L.A. Latino community. When you were absorbing everything that was going on, what were some of your favorite storylines, or things that you looked at and just said, “Yes, this is so true! This family dynamic is exactly how it is in a real family!”

Joanna Zanella: My character Christina was the responsible daughter who wanted to make sure her parents were safe, and try to play that role of being the responsible one in the family. At one point, Christina became me, because in real life that’s how it is in my family, with my brother and my dad and my mom. Sometimes I’m the one that makes decision and guides everyone through certain situations. That definitely was a part of me in Christina.

JM Longoria III: When Natalie and Hilda wrote this, they said they wanted to make it conversational, and I think the story’s very true. It’s a reflection of current Mexican American families. As far as my relationship with my own mom and dad, personally, they’re very supportive of everything, and you see that through Eliana’s character, my mom, where she’s supporting her gay son. He’s trying to get an education, trying to better himself. They’re hard workers, parents working, owning a business, trying to earn a living. I think, growing up in South Texas, that’s everything we saw. My parents told me, “Work hard and you’ll succeed.” So, I think that’s a great reflection of family dynamics that stands true for me.

Mathew Rodriguez: When preparing for your roles, did you meet any openly HIV-positive people to talk to? How did you prepare in terms of the HIV aspect of the role?

Joanna Zanella: I hadn’t met anybody who was openly living with HIV when I first picked up this project, but when we did have the table read, Natalie and Hilda were there, and JM and I were both asking them questions, and the first thing I did was I went up to them and said, “Hey, can you talk to me a little bit about Christina in real life? What is she like? What is her family like?” They have a patient who is Christina in real life. I really wanted to be true to that person. I didn’t want to play the character in a way that wouldn’t be true to me and wouldn’t be true to that person. So, I did talk to Hilda and Natalie. I wanted to make sure that I could do my best performance so that, when somebody who is in Christina’s shoes is watching it, they can feel that this is real life. These things really happen. That was something that really helped me and got me into the mindset of what it meant to play Christina.

JM Longoria III: It was a similar process for me. I do have a connection to someone who’s HIV positive: one of my instructors, a teacher that I had. Just observing her, she’s a beautiful spirit. She’s been positive for over 20 years, I’d say, as well. It’s just amazing to me, because I wasn’t aware of life today, as far as being HIV positive. You know, you hear these stories, and you have something in your head and you think about that life, but it’s completely different — trying to bring that in, and talking to Natalie and Hilda, and asking, “What’s my relationship with my sister? With my parents?” You can see in the telenovela, after the first two episodes, my dynamic with my dad and my relationship with my mom, and sort of being stuck in the middle, and being supportive to both. That was some of my research and my process: It was discovering day by day, and seeing what else I could discover.

I didn’t even know the gentleman who spoke at the premiere event, but he spoke, and afterwards he came up to me and he said, “Can I get your autograph?” and I told him “Can I get your autograph? You’re the one who’s living this and who’s helping us understand what we need in order to communicate out to everyone in the Latino community.” After talking to him for 15 minutes afterward, I was a completely different person.

Hopefully this telenovela continues — I want to see where this character goes, now that I have that connection now with him, and with an actual person and an actual story of living with HIV.

Mathew Rodriguez: That leads into my next question. Would you love to do it again, if there’s a push for another four episodes?

Joanna Zanella: I definitely would. It would be amazing. Hilda and Natalie have talked about extending and having more episodes and pushing it out more to the community. For me, I would be honored to be part of this project, to work with Paco, and Eliana, and Daniel and everybody again. I would be crazy about going back and doing 1,000 more episodes.

JM Longoria III: I’d love to go back. It was a pleasure going to work everyday. It was so much fun; just learning and asking questions, it was such a free learning environment. No questions about it, I’d love to continue forward with this.

Mathew Rodriguez: I’d love to hear about your relationship in real life with the actors who play the mother and the father and especially the abuelita (grandma); she is my favorite character. I think hers is just an amazing storyline. What was it like playing a family with them? What did you learn from them?

Joanna Zanella: It’s funny that you say that because Maria [Richwine], who plays Abuelita, is hilarious. She’s the funniest lady I ever met. Ever since I met her, I’ve said, “I hope one day, when I’m her age, I look just like her.” She’s absolutely beautiful, and the fact that she was able to get into that grandma character, it was amazing to see. But she was a goofball on set. Every time they cut, it was like me and JM were cracking up every time, because she would say something outrageous, and every one would be laughing.

JM Longoria III: She’s the last person you’d expect, because she’s dressed in old grandma garb, but then she’d be saying these crazy things, but that’s what would make it so much fun. We have a wonderful relationship with everyone. We communicate probably on a daily basis via Facebook, and we email things like, “Love you, Mom!”

This project has gone beyond just the set: We’ve become a family in real life.

Mathew Rodriguez: From an acting perspective, what was it like to have to do the scenes in both English and Spanish?

Joanna Zanella: We’d have our scripts, and we’d read it in English and in Spanish. My first language is Spanish, so I was more comfortable with it, and would memorize the Spanish lines more easily than I would the English. Sometimes when I’d start a scene with the script in English, Paco’d say “Joanna, do it in Spanish first.”

Then we’d do it in Spanish, and he’d say, “OK, now you can do it in English.” Because I think I gave him what he wanted exactly in Spanish. I think it’s just because my first language is Spanish, and I’d feel more of the novella style of it in that language. And then he’d say, “OK, now do it in English. All of us had our little niches in certain languages, which was fun to see.

Mathew Rodriguez: From an acting perspective, what was it like to have to do the scenes in both English and Spanish?

Joanna Zanella: We’d have our scripts, and we’d read it in English and in Spanish. My first language is Spanish, so I was more comfortable with it, and would memorize the Spanish lines more easily than I would the English. Sometimes when I’d start a scene with the script in English, Paco’d say “Joanna, do it in Spanish first.”

Then we’d do it in Spanish, and he’d say, “OK, now you can do it in English.” Because I think I gave him what he wanted exactly in Spanish. I think it’s just because my first language is Spanish, and I’d feel more of the novella style of it in that language. And then he’d say, “OK, now do it in English. All of us had our little niches in certain languages, which was fun to see.

JM Longoria III: I know my strength was definitely more in English. Spanish was my first language, and then I went to public school; at home, all we speak is English. I had a little more trouble with Spanish, but luckily I had Joanna, because she’s so fluent. I’d ask, you know, “How do I say this?” So, Joanna, thank you for being such a great coach for me.

It’s interesting: In a conversation with Paco, one of my roommates, also a director, asked him, “Which of the two was harder for you to edit?” Paco said he had a lot more trouble with the English because we did all the English scenes first, and by the time we did the Spanish, we already were in it, and understood the scene, and where our emotional level should be. It was great.

It’s interesting if you watch both languages, because you think you’re watching completely different episodes, but it’s the same line. The change in language changes it a bit more. It was so much fun, and I’m glad we were able to do it in both languages.

Mathew Rodriguez: Had either of you done any telenovela acting, or anything in that format, before? According to Paco, you guys wanted to pay homage to the genre and update it and make it more accessible, and pay homage to telenovela acting in particular. What did you do to prepare for it?

Joanna Zanella: I had actually worked on a novela when I was 15 years old. Because I come from a very Latin background, and I’ve always been involved with novelas, I was already kind of used to the novela acting in Spanish; but in English, it’s completely different. In Spanish, it’s mas pacionado. It’s more passionate. There’s more feeling, and in English, even though it’s the same script, it’s not so much like you’re being passionate; I would say it’s a little more toned down. To me, not that I would struggle, but I always had to keep that in mind, because in Spanish it was a different read than it was in English. Even though it was fun, it was a challenge for me, because I always had to come in and out of both. And I think the same thing happened with JM.

JM Longoria III: Definitely. I had a little more of a struggle in Spanish, because the language itself makes it more passionate in Spanish. So, for me, I felt kind of the opposite: I always felt like I had to tone it down a little bit in Spanish, because I didn’t want it to be too aggressive or too overdone.

I did a small pilot back in Austin before I moved out here to L.A. It was called Mundos diferentes. It was a Spanish telenovela about kids in a high school, so that was my first little introduction to it. But it was the same thing: How do you play true to the reality of the scene but pay homage to the telenovela style? It was a little prep for me to do this project.

Mathew Rodriguez: What have you taken away from this whole experience? What changed you during it?

JM Longoria III: I think a few things. As an actor, it’s a validation that, when something is meant to be, it’s meant to be. As actors, we go into auditions hopefully on a daily basis, and you may not hear anything about some jobs, it may not be you that’s chosen — but when it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. I went into this not knowing, and then having talked to the clients afterwards, they said, “The moment we saw your audition tape, we knew you were Enrique.”

As far as the project as a whole, I think we have to continue learning and wanting to explore and educate ourselves, and finding out more about HIV and STDs [sexually transmitted diseases]. I thought I was educated, but I’m not, and I’m constantly having to ask Hilda and Natalie: “Is this safe practice? Is that?”

I’m trying to get as much education as I can to put out to the world. To be that voice. That’s what I’ve taken away, that I had that opportunity to do that.

Joanna Zanella: I agree with JM. You can go into a thousand auditions and you may not get one, or you may get five. But, when it’s written for you, there’s no way on Earth to get away. When they see you, and it’s for you, that’s it. You are that character.

Also, working with Eliana, and Daniel: They are such amazing actors. It was such an experience. They’re just so passionate about what they do that it made me become a better actress, as well. It made me step it up and say, “Oh my God, I have to bring my A game, because everyone’s an A game here.” It also made me realize that with every character, you have to learn about that character’s life. And I’m glad that I was able to ask Hilda and Natalie everything about Christina’s life.

Mathew Rodriguez is the editorial project manager for TheBody.com and TheBodyPRO.com.

Follow Mathew on Twitter: @mathewrodriguez.

By Candace Y.A. Montague for Capital Community News

Having a conversation about sex can be awkward. When HIV is involved the conversation can go from awkward to complicated. Questions about knowing one’s HIV status, condom use, and number of sex partners can help couples better understand their risk and avoid infection. Yet many heterosexual couples in the District avoid the “talk” and miss a prime opportunity to protect themselves. This year, weeks before World AIDS Day (December 1), a report published from the DC Department of Health spotlights the epidemic among heterosexuals in DC. The results show that lack of conversation has led to a high infection rate among straight couples.

He Said…

Donald Head discovered he was HIV positive by happenstance while working as a tester for Community Education Group in Southeast. He and his team needed a few more completed HIV tests to make their quota for the day so they decided to test each other. When his co-worker started looking at him peculiarly he knew something was wrong. “My co-worker said ‘Yours came back positive, man.’ I didn’t believe him. I told him to swab me again. It came back positive the second time. I was blown.” Donald knew who infected him. It didn’t come from a random sexual encounter, and he was not an intravenous drug user. He was infected by his wife. He had no choice but to have the talk with her.

The conversation that followed was not easy to initiate. “It took me a week just tell her I was HIV positive. When I confronted her about it she got loud and went off on me sorta like someone who is guilty would do. I felt betrayed. All the conversations we had while I was in jail and over the phone and all the letter writing flashed through my mind. All this time she was lying to me. I was negative before and after I came out of jail. I showed her my results and asked her to show me hers.” According to Donald her viral load (the level of HIV in one’s blood) was more than 10,000. The two have since split, and Donald continues to work as an HIV tester and counselor. His advice to others is lucid. “I tell the brothers, wife or no wife, with the rate of infection being the way it is these days, you can’t afford to go without protection. I don’t give a damn. You can’t put your fate in her hands. If you’re negative, stay negative.”

The DC Department of Health’s 2009 Comprehensive Plan for HIV states that between 1996 and 2004, 11.3% of African American men in the District contracted HIV from heterosexual sex. Although the current Comprehensive Plan for HIV doesn’t cite data on infection rates among African-American straight men, HIV infection through heterosexual contact remains the second leading mode of transmission. Larry Bryant is a straight African-American male in DC who is HIV positive. As the Director for National Advocacy and Organizing for Housing Works, an AIDS advocacy organization in Northwest, Bryant feels that too many straight black men shy away from the conversation. “We need to own the conversation just like gay men and straight women do. We need everyday black male leaders in the community to speak openly and frequently about HIV and how vulnerable we are to contracting it. The messages that we send to women about taking control of your health and knowing your status must apply to straight men too.”

She said…

Rebecca* is an African-American DC resident. She is in her fifties, unemployed, suffers from bipolar disorder, and is married to the man who infected her with HIV. When she found out she was positive, she was devastated. “I cried and cried because I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to stay with him. He has issues. But I figured, now I can’t escape him because who is gonna want me after finding out I’m positive.” Her husband, an unemployed auto mechanic, did a stretch in prison on drug charges and claimed that he contracted the virus from dental work during his incarceration. He admitted to her that he knew he was positive before they were sexually active.

According to Rebecca, her husband has a temper. She tried several times to leave him but couldn’t get away. “He won’t leave me alone. He has kicked me. Hit me. He dragged me to his car by my hair while I was waiting in line for a spot at the shelter, while all those people stood there and watched. No one even tried to help me.” They have lived in and out of motels and in their car until Rebecca finally escaped from him in 2011. She now stays at a transitional housing complex for women in the District, but he comes there to see her. She has filed for divorce and is awaiting the final decision. “I’m tired of him dragging me all over the city. I’m tired of living in fear. I’m tired of the bruises on my legs from him forcing himself on me. I just want to be free from this. He already gave me a death sentence. My life is already destroyed.”

The infection rates among black heterosexual women in poor neighborhoods (particularly Wards 7 and 8) have nearly doubled from 6.3 percent in 2009 to 12.1 percent in 2011. Black Women east of the Anacostia River are at a higher risk for contracting HIV. Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick, medical director of the Infectious Disease Center at United Medical Center in Southeast, says the problem with women is a culture of silence that fuels stereotypes. “The biggest challenge I encounter in my practice with HIV-positive women is their struggle with stigma in the community. The community’s outdated and erroneous perceptions about HIV-positive people result in failure to openly discuss HIV with partners and inability to disclose their status. This is not a women’s issue, this is a community issue.”

Where Do We Go from Here?

Dr. Greg Pappas, Director of the HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Tuberculosis Administration (HAHSTA), offers basic explanations and some solutions that people can apply on their own. “Heterosexuals are still not getting tested. Many of them still don’t know they’re positive. There are a lot of men and women who share partners. And they’re not using condoms. People need to protect themselves and protect their partners.” He also suggested being your own advocate and asking for the test during doctor’s visits. “You need to ask for the test. You need to know there is treatment available in the District. And you need to stay on your medications because it keeps you healthy and you’re less likely to spread the virus to others people. This is how you protect yourself and your community. It’s not a death sentence at all.” He concluded that “the power to stop the cycle begins within. It’s time to stop the blame game and start making healthy choices.”

Candace Y.A. Montague is a freelance health writer in Washington, DC.

*Name changed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Join the Campaign to End AIDS today!

Dear friends,

I am pleased to tell you that Housing Works was elected as a representative to the NGO delegation of the Programme Coordinating Board of UNAIDS at the Programme Coordinating Board’s December meeting. I will be representing Housing Works in that role over the next two years.

If you are unfamiliar with the “PCB”, it is the governing body of UNAIDS. Its membership includes 22 UN member states, 12 UN sponsoring organizations, and, unlike any other United Nations entity or program, five NGO seats that are shared among 10 NGO’s who rotate as representative an alternate. The 10 NGO’s are selected from five regions of the world. Housing Works is one of two North American representatives.

NGO’s generally serve for two or three year terms. NGO’s on the PCB cannot vote, but they can participate in debate and can propose “decision points.” By tradition, the Board makes its decisions by consensus, making the right to vote less important. Also by tradition, the NGO delegations operates by consensus as the voice of people living with HIV, key at-risk populations, and organized civil society.

I am proceeded in this position by the MSM Global Forum, ably represented by George Ayala, and am currently serving with Ebony Johnson, who represents the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS.

Housing Works applied for this role with a couple of goals in mind. First, we would like to ensure that HIV/AIDS is included in substantive ways in the United Nations’ post-2015 development goals. Second, we would like to see UNAIDS promote housing and other structural interventions that,need to be implemented along with biomedical approaches if the disparities in the AIDS pandemic are to be addressed. Third, we see this as a forum for grappling with the human rights injustices, particularly those impacting on the LGBT community, people who use drugs, sex workers, and homeless people, that perpetuate the epidemic.

I would like to take advantage of this list to broaden C2EA’s awareness of the role of international bodies such as UNAIDS in the fight against AIDS, the role the United States plays in these bodies, and the role that these bodies can play impacting on US policy, both domestic and international. Moreover, I am supposed to be representing you. So I would love to hear from you.

Below you will find a report from the NGO delegation summarizing the last meeting of the PCB.

Sincerely,
Charles King, President/CEO Housing Works
king@housingworks.org

Click here for the report from UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibe.

By Justin Peters for Slate

Today, we interrupt our Newtown-and-NRA-related programming to bring you an important holiday message about prison rape. For most of us, our familiarity with prison rape begins and ends with tasteless jokes and half the plotlines from the HBO series Oz. But for actual prisoners, prison rape is a real and persistent problem. A 2012 Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that “9.6 percent of former state prisoners reported one or more incidents of sexual victimization” during their most recent stint behind bars. Its preponderance speaks to a systemic problem with America’s penal system.

It’s important to note that the study centered on former prisoners, because even if a rape victim leaves prison—and according to the BJS, 95 percent of prisoners are eventually released—he or she often finds it hard to forget the trauma. The BJS report found that, after leaving prison, “72 percent of victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization said they felt shame or humiliation, and 56 percent said they felt guilt. Seventy-nine percent of unwilling victims of staff sexual misconduct said they felt shame or humiliation, and 72 percent said they felt guilt.”

As one survivor of prison rape put it:

Getting raped destroys you from the inside out, and it takes a part of you and puts it where you can’t reach it. My momma quit writing me because she found out I was married to another man in here. She told me I was sick and she did not want to write anymore. And she stopped. See, she knows I got raped, but she doesn’t understand how I’m surviving now. I ran to another man and married him so I wouldn’t get raped again. My thoughts are so crazy on this; at times I do not understand them. The fear is so great in my heart.

Prison rape doesn’t just bring on mental health consequences. Prisons are hotbeds of HIV, Hepatitis C, and other STDs, and once a rape victim contracts these diseases, they don’t go away upon release. As a 2009 report from the anti-prison rape organization Just Detention International put it, “men and women who did not receive testing, counseling, and treatment in prison are unlikely to have the knowledge, skills, or access to the resources needed upon release to protect themselves and their loved ones.” In other words, the odds are good that they’ll be passing these diseases on to their free-world sexual partners.

In 2003, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, the first major legislative attempt to address this issue. The act provided funding for research, created a National Prison Rape Reduction Commission, and directed all prison officials to take a zero-tolerance approach to rape within their institutions.

There are also various non-profits working to reduce sexual assault in prisons. One such group is Just Detention International, which “seeks to end sexual abuse in all forms of detention.” JDI has launched a project called “Words of Hope” that allows you to send a holiday message of support to prisoners who’ve suffered sexual abuse behind bars.

I’m sure some inmates probably just throw the cards away. But for those who don’t, these messages show that there are people who neither judge nor blame them for what happened.

Still skeptical? Ask this guy about the good a holiday card can do: (click though to the original article to see video)

I like this project a lot, not least because I enjoy holiday cards more than anybody else I know. I got an unexpected one the other week, and it just about made my day. If you want to participate, you can go to the Words of Hope website and send a message up until December 31st. I did.

MONTGOMERY AL — A federal judge today ordered Alabama to stop segregating prisoners living with HIV, ruling that the practice violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

U.S. District Court Judge Myron H. Thompson ruled in a class-action lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of all Alabama prisoners with HIV that the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) discriminates against the prisoners by housing them separately from all other prisoners and categorically denies them equal access to prison rehabilitative programs.

The court ruled the ADA prohibits blanket disability-based exclusions and mandates that prisoners with disabilities must be housed in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs of the individuals. Exceptions may be made only on an individualized, case-by-case basis if the specific situation warrants different treatment.

Thompson said in his decision: “It is evident that, while the ADOC’s categorical segregation policy has been an unnecessary tool for preventing the transmission of HIV, it has been an effective one for humiliating and isolating prisoners living with the disease.”

“Today’s decision is historic,” said Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU National Prison Project and lead counsel for the plaintiffs. “It spells an end to a segregation policy that has inflicted needless misery on Alabama prisoners with HIV and their families.”

The court issued a permanent injunction ordering Alabama to abandon its discriminatory practices, including its categorical exclusion of prisoners with HIV from work-release jobs in the food industry, from assignment to faith-based honor dorms, and from a host of other rehabilitative, educational, trade skills and vocational programs.

“Ending a policy that treated human beings like cattle to be tagged and herded is a tremendous victory for human rights,” said Olivia Turner, executive director of the ACLU of Alabama, which participated in the lawsuit.

The court found that HIV-positive prisoners with serious mental health needs and substance abuse problems were wrongfully excluded even from critically important treatment programs.

The court’s decision also bans Alabama’s policy of requiring all male prisoners with HIV to always wear white armbands to alert others of their status, which Winter characterized as “a latter-day yellow star.”

The suit, Henderson et al. v. Thomas et al, was filed last year. There are approximately 240 male and 10 female prisoners living with HIV in the Alabama prison system.

During a month-long trial that began Sept. 17 in Montgomery, the ACLU argued that Alabama’s HIV policy is not based on legitimate interests in safety and is unnecessary to prevent the transmission of HIV.

Experts testified that the risk of transmitting HIV is virtually nonexistent for patients properly treated with modern HIV medications. And in surprise testimony, ADOC’s associate commissioner in charge of security admitted on cross-examination that he no longer believes the HIV-segregation policy is justified.

“Alabama’s policies regarding prisoners living with HIV are relics from an era of hysteria,” said Amanda Goad, staff attorney with the ACLU AIDS Project. “We look forward to seeing the Department of Corrections fully implement Judge Thompson’s decision and end its discriminatory practices.”

The Judge’s decision is at:

http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/dkt249_opinion._signed_by_honorable_judge_myron_h._thompson.pdf

For background on the ACLU’s case, visit:

http://www.aclu.org/hiv-aids-prisoners-rights/henderson-et-al-v-thomas-et-al

For more information contact:
Tom Rosenthal, ACLU National
917.459.8805
trosenthal@aclu.org

ACLU Media
212.549.2666
media@aclu.org

Art Jackson, community educator of HIV prevention and care services in Fayetteville, NC, delivered a rousing call-to-action for reform in HIV/HCV testing, funds allocation, care and education at the Southern Harm Reduction and Drug Policy Network conference Thursday, September 6, 2012, in Atlanta, GA.

Art Jackson’s Passionate Call-to-Action for HIV Services from North Carolina Harm Reduction on Vimeo.

Click here to join Art and other activists as a C2EA member and visit the C2EA Mid Atlantic Facebook Group.

Video from the North Carolina Harm Reduction.

The CDC is casting for an upcoming AIDS Testing Awareness AD Campaign. They are looking for Latino men for the ad.

They are continuing to accept photo submissions at cdcjanuary2013@gmail.com as there will be another casting call during the first week of January 2013.

They need to cast Hispanic/Latino men (ages 21-40’s) for an upcoming HIV-AIDS testing awareness ad campaign for the US Government’s CDC (Center for Disease Control). CDC is using real men (not necessarily actors or models) who get tested regularly and are not ashamed to say so. The goal is to take away some of the stigma attached with getting tested, especially in the Hispanic community.

This is a paid job.

For consideration, email recent photo along with a short statement of your reason(s) for wanting to participate before 4 January 2013.

In-person meet for casting call-backs only will take place Sunday, 6 January 2013 in New York City. If cast, actual shoot takes place during the week of 28 January 2013 also in New York City.

Please email photos to: cdcjanuary2013@gmail.com

By Jorge Martin Melchor for Indian Country Today Media Network

HIV and AIDS cases are increasing among Native American populations. Officials say many Native groups lack the information about the diseases and how to prevent them from spreading, and that has resulted in a growing problem. Authorities in Arizona are trying to reverse that trend by encouraging people on the Navajo Nation Reservation and throughout Indian country to get tested, and educating Native populations about the spread of HIV. But they face difficult challenges, including traditional taboos in speaking of sex or death. They have tried to overcome that by incorporating traditional medicine in the treatment of HIV and AIDS. Dr. Paul Bloomquist, of Indian Health Services, urged Native Americans to get tested, even if they don’t think they are infected. “One in five people don’t know they have HIV infection, and the only way that they can prevent transmission to others and get well or prevent themselves from getting sick is to get tested and know their status,” he said.

Specific to the Navajo Nation, use:

One medical center in the Four Corners region is working to reduce HIV transmissions among Navajos and offers culturally competent treatment and care. At the Indian Medical Center in Gallup, New Mexico, modern medicine meets traditional Navajo healing. Medicine men visit hospital rooms to offer ancient prayers, blessings and healing herbs for drinking. Dual treatment is encouraged by the Indian Health Service so patients feel more optimistic about their treatment and continue receiving care.

Click through to the original article to view a short video discussing HIV/AIDS in the American Indian community.

Join the Campaign to End AIDS today for support and resources to organize around these issues in your community!

Posted on behalf of our friends at The National Minority AIDS Council.

We at NMAC are in the final year of a project to develop an action plan to address the persistent and disproportionate impact HIV has on black gay and bisexual men. As part of the project, we are circulating a survey to better understand perspectives and perceptions among black gay, bisexual and same-gender loving men around modalities and structural barriers to prevention and care services. This survey will contribute to both the action plan and help us determine which resources to highlight on an online resource/educational application we are developing called RISE (Resources to Improve, Strengthen and Empower).

If you are a black gay, bisexual or same-gender loving man we hope that you will take a moment to complete the brief survey (30 questions) and share with your networks. If not, we ask that you please consider sharing with any colleagues, friends or loved ones who may be willing to participate and help us to shed light on the needs of this critical, but under-served, population.

To complete the survey, click here or copy and paste the survey’s URL [https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RISE_2012] into your internet browser’s address bar.

Thank You,

Kali Lindsey
Director of Legislative & Public Affairs

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18th:
CONGRESSIONAL CALL-IN DAY TO SUPPORT HIV/AIDS PROGRAMS!

Tell Speaker Boehner and President Obama that cutting programs vital to people with HIV/AIDS is no way to reduce the deficit – we need a fair and balanced approach now!

BACKGROUND:

~ House Speaker Boehner and President Obama are negotiating now to reduce the federal deficit. Critical services upon which millions of Americans rely, including persons living with HIV/AIDS, are at risk for cuts.
~ The Ryan White Program, Medicaid, Medicare, housing, prevention and other programs that make up the safety net for vulnerable Americans with HIV/AIDS and the NIH-supported research that holds the keys to ending the pandemic are all on the line.
~ Negotiations on this isssue will end soon, so we need to exert pressure now!

ACTION NEEDED:
Please call Speaker Boehner and President Obama and tell them to prevent harmful cuts and caps to health care and low-income programs, including those that impact persons with HIV/AIDS, in negotiations to reduce the deficit — we need a fair and balanced approach now! Please make calls today!

~ To call House Speaker Boehner, dial 202-225-0600
~ To call President Obama, dial 202-456-1414

MESSAGE:
Please call with this message: I am calling to ask Speaker Boehner/President Obama to prevent harmful cuts and caps to health care, research, and low-income programs, including those that impact persons living with HIV/AIDS, such as the Ryan White Program, Medicaid, Medicare, housing, and prevention programs! We need a fair and balanced approach now that prevents further cuts to these vital programs!

~ Balancing the budget on the backs of vulnerable Americans, including those living with HIV, is wrong, will potentially cost lives, and will cut jobs in the health care and human needs sectors.

~ Early and reliable access to HIV care, treatment, and support helps people with HIV live healthy and productive lives and is cost effective. Investing in HIV prevention today translates into better health outcomes and less spending in the future.

~ In my state/district, such programs are greatly needed, because (insert local details or tell personal story)strong>.

If you have questions, please contact __________________________, thank you!

This alert is being sent by the AIDS Budget and Appropriations Coalition (ABAC), a working group of the Federal AIDS Policy Partnership (FAPP), a coalition of over one hundred national and community-based HIV/AIDS and public health organizations that represent people living with HIV/AIDS, HIV medical provider and researchers, and advocates, as well as community organizations that provide critical HIV related health care and support services. ABAC advocates for increased resources for domestic HIV/AIDS programs across the federal government.