House GOP Proposes $1.6 Billion in Cuts to CDC Budget, Including HIV Program

More than four years ago, then-President Donald Trump declared an ambitious goal that had bipartisan support: ending the HIV epidemic in the United States.

Now, that Trump program is one of several health initiatives targeted for substantial cuts by members of his own party as they eye next year’s elections.

Pushing a slate of conservative political priorities that also takes aim at sex education for teens, health worker vaccine mandates, and more, Republicans in the House of Representatives have proposed a spending bill that would cut $1.6 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — one-sixth of the agency’s budget.

The Indiana HIV Crisis Didn’t Have to Happen

What happens when you shut down health centers that provide HIV testing and ban programs that encourage drug users not to share needles during a spike in opioid use? In rural Indiana, the result was a surge in HIV infections. More than 80 people have tested positive for HIV in Scott County since mid-December, with most cases linked to intravenous use of Opana, a prescription painkiller.

The warning signs were there: Four years ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised of the rapid spread of Hepatitis C—which often accompanies HIV—among young drug users in Indiana, many of whom shared needles and other injection equipment. Indiana has the lowest per capita spending on public health of any state, while Scott County “has high rates of poverty and despair,” wrote Shane Avery, a local family physician. “Add to this a high rate of uninsured, low rates of completing a high school education, and insufficient access to public health services such as testing for sexually transmitted infections and mental services,” and you get conditions ripe for an addiction-fueled epidemic. The only clinic to offer HIV testing in the county, run by Planned Parenthood, closed in 2013, after state legislators pushed through a series of ideologically driven funding cuts.

Indiana Shut Down Its Rural Planned Parenthood Clinics And Got An HIV Outbreak

Scott County, Indiana, the center of an exploding HIV outbreak, has been without an HIV testing center since early 2013, when the sole provider -- a Planned Parenthood clinic -- was forced to close its doors. The clinic did not offer abortion services.

The Scott County clinic and four other Planned Parenthood facilities in the state, all of which provided HIV testing and information, have shuttered since 2011, in large part due to funding cuts to the state's public health infrastructure. Those cuts came amid a national and local political campaign to demonize the health care provider. Now, the state is scrambling to erect pop-up clinics to combat an unprecedented HIV epidemic caused by intravenous drug use.

Anti-Gay, Anti-Choice Children’s AIDS Fund Still Raking In Taxpayer Money

In July, I reported that, despite promises President Obama made on the campaign trail, the federal government was still providing millions of dollars in grants for HIV-prevention programming to anti-gay, anti-choice evangelical groups at home and abroad, particularly in Africa. Newly filed 2013 tax documents and a grant tracking website at the Department of Health and Human Services have revealed that one controversial evangelical organization I profiled, the Children’s AIDS Fund (CAF), has again been awarded federal funding. In June 2014, CAF Uganda received $1.5 million as part of a multiyear HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention program. That brings the total CAF Uganda has received since the start of Obama’s second term to at least $6.6 million.

Greek Financial Crisis Tied To Country's Rising Rates Of HIV, Depression, Infant Deaths

LONDON - Researchers say they have found new evidence that Greece's financial crisis is taking a toll on the health of its citizens, including rising rates of HIV, tuberculosis, depression and even infant deaths.

Since the economic crisis hit several years ago, the government's health spending has been slashed and hundreds of thousands of people have been left without health insurance. As cuts have been made to AIDS prevention programs, rates of HIV and tuberculosis in drug users have spiked.

Why Is No One On the First Treatment To Prevent H.I.V.?

In November, 2010, the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a three-year clinical trial, funded by the National Institutes of Health, announcing the arrival of a treatment that could reduce the risk of contracting H.I.V. by more than ninety per cent. The treatment involved a blue, oval pill containing emtricitabine and tenofovir. Marketed under the brand name Truvada, the pill was synthesized in 2004 by Gilead Sciences, the world’s largest producer of branded H.I.V. drugs, and has been used in combination with other antiretrovirals as a primary treatment for people living with AIDS. The N.I.H. team discovered that a daily dose of Truvada not only suppressed the virus in people who were already infected but also prevented healthy people from contracting H.I.V. in the first place. Following the N.I.H. study, which tracked gay men in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, South Africa, Thailand, and the United States, additional trials showed the drug to be effective for heterosexual men and women, as well as for injection-drug users. Researchers called the treatment “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” or PrEP for short. Others have called it “the new condom.”