Archives » Monday, August 25, 2008
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Adam B. Kushner
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Aug 25, 2008 09:34 PM
The constellation of lobby groups in Denver to influence the
influencers doesn’t just include AT&T, the Distilled Spirits
Council, and the National Education Association. Public interest groups
are also well-represented. The Global AIDS Alliance Fund gave a
luncheon today to honor members of Congress who have battled the
disease’s spread. AIDS activists, it turns out, are in an awkward
position.
For one thing, they don’t want to alienate a potential Republican
president by speaking too forcefully for Barack Obama. But the
overwhelming opinion among attendees was that Obama would do more to
fight AIDS than McCain. “We’re a bipartisan group, but we have to admit
that the force for change comes within the Democratic Party,” says Paul
Zeitz, the Fund’s executive director. “We sent out AIDS questionnaires
to all nine of the Democratic primary candidates and all of the
Republican ones. We heard back from every single Democrat and not a
single Republican.”
At the same time, there is a grudging respect for the work done by the
Bush administration, which has devoted more than $30 billion—a greater
sum than any government in history. AIDS fighters at the Democratic
convention like the idea, but not the execution: They resent that about
one-third of AIDS grants go to abstinence-only education, especially
considering the peer-reviewed studies they cite showing it doesn’t
work; they think the global gag rule—which bars money from health
clinics that so much as mention abortion as a
possibility, let alone perform it—deprives hundreds of thousands of
people of healthcare; and, as always, they think more should be done
(one study says that only 20 percent of people infected with AIDS
receive treatment when they need it). But overall they appreciate the
ramp-up of funds. (Amy Coen, the president of Population Action
International, told me last month that U.S. AIDS grants had so flooded
the aid community that European governments, feeling they could make
little difference, are stepping down their grants.)
Yet the complaints go beyond mere gripes: if it follows the activists
in Denver, the next administration could mark a huge shift in AIDS
policy. Contented somewhat by the funds dispersed abroad, advocates are
turning their attention inward to the United States. Danny Glover was
only one among several speakers to cite a recent CDC study showing
domestic AIDS infectious could be undercounted by 40 percent. It’s
especially bad among African Americans, who represent half of all AIDS
deaths in the United States. If black America were its own country, it
would have the sixteenth highest rate of HIV infection worldwide. And,
according to Marjorie Hill, the CEO of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, even in
the United States AIDS remains badly stigmatized, socially and
professionally—particularly among gay men, poor women, and drug users.
Advocates here feel that, while America has looked outward to stop AIDS
abroad, perhaps from a sense of noblesse oblige, the disease is on the
rise at home.
Meanwhile, outside the conference:
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