Southern HIV/AIDS Strategy Initiative

The National Association of People with AIDS (NAPWA) and the Treatment Access Expansion Project (TAEP) presented Carolyn McAllaster and SASI with a Positive Leadership Award on April 23, 2012 during AIDS Watch.  SASI is honored to share the award with C. Virginia Fields and the 30 for 30 Campaign and Terry McGovern of the Ford Foundation who also received Positive Leadership Awards. Read more about the awardees on NAPWA’s website.

Eighty-eight national, state, and community-based organizations have signed on to SASI’s Call to Action urging the Administration to create a State of the South Task Force.  See the list of Sign-on Organizations here.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (California) and Congressman Hank Johnson (Georgia) are circulating a Sign-on Letter to Members of Congress highlighting the HIV epidemic among women and especially in the southern United States.  SASI’s report, HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the South Reaches Crisis Proportions in Last Decade, was cited repeatedly. The letter will be circulated through Friday, May 18th.

SASI Call to Action:  SASI calls for the White House, the Office of National AIDS Policy, and the Department of Health and Human Services to convene a State of the South Task Force to address the South’s exploding HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The Deep South – Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and East Texas – is facing a devastating HIV crisis.  The Deep South has the highest rates of new HIV and AIDS diagnoses in the United States and people living with HIV in the Deep South die at much higher rates than in other parts of the country.  This crisis is particularly acute in certain populations in the South: 54% of new HIV cases among African Americans in the United States were in the Deep South; 1 in 5 African American MSM (men who have sex with men) in the South are estimated to be living with HIV; 8 of the Deep South states report a higher proportion of women among new HIV infections than the US average; and one-half of the new HIV diagnoses among Hispanics/Latinos occur in the Southern US.

SASI is asking that the federal government convene a State of the South Task Force to recommend National HIV/AIDS Strategy implementation steps directed at the Southeast, to identify collaborative opportunities across federal agencies, and to identify funding opportunities for projects aimed at evaluating best HIV prevention and care practices for the Southern US.  SASI is asking that the White House announce the Task Force members, including leading administration officials across federal agencies, leading state officials, private sector partners, people living with HIV in the South and their HIV health and social service providers, at the International AIDS Conference in July 2012.

Please support the call for a State of the South Task Force by becoming a SASI coalition partner and signing on to SASI’s Call to Action.   If your organization would like to sign on, please e-mail sasi@law.duke.edu with the name of your group by April 16th. 

HIV and the Long Tail of Child Sexual Abuse:  Duke University researchers in collaboration with researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Appalachian State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that one in four HIV patients in the study had been sexually abused as a child.  More than half of the patients in the study had experienced sexual or physical abuse in their lifetimes.  These traumatic experiences were linked in the study to worse health outcomes among these patients.

Durham, N.C. –The Southeastern United States is experiencing the highest rate of new HIV/AIDS infections confirms a comprehensive research report, “HIV/AIDS Epidemic in the South Reaches Crisis Proportions in Last Decade” released Thursday by the Southern HIV/AIDS Strategy Initiative (SASI).  The report takes a close look at nine southern states that have been particularly hard hit by the epidemic:  Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and (East) Texas.

“We call on the President’s Office of National AIDS Policy to coordinate an enhanced federal response and focused federal resources on the southern states,” said Carolyn McAllaster, director of the Duke AIDS Legal Project and SASI project director. “As the report highlights, meeting the goals of our National HIV/AIDS Strategy, including reducing new HIV cases, increasing access to care, and addressing health disparities, demands immediate attention to the HIV epidemic in the South. The South faces an urgent need for resources to fight the epidemic as the South has the highest rates of both new HIV diagnoses and HIV-related deaths in the country, as well as poor social determinants of health and high poverty rates.”

According to the report, commissioned by SASI and compiled by the Duke Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research, 35 percent of new HIV infections in 2009 were in the nine targeted southern states, which contain only 22 percent of the U.S. population. The targeted states also lead the nation in new AIDS diagnoses rates.  Nine of the ten states with the highest rates of death due to HIV in the country are in the South, and all nine states are among the 15 states with the highest HIV death rates.  The report also identifies that 99.5 percent of people on waiting lists for AIDS Drug Assistance Programs live in the South.

SASI representatives have shared the report findings with Jeffrey Crowley, Director of the Office of National AIDS Policy, Dr. Ron Valdiserri, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health, Infectious Diseases at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Christopher Bates, Executive Director of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.  “We are now waiting for a response from our federal government” said Kathie Hiers, a member of SASI’s steering committee, a participant in the DC-based meetings with federal officials and Chief Executive Officer of AIDS Alabama.

The CDC announced that its 2012 HIV prevention awards were allocated based on the number of people living with HIV in each jurisdiction.  SASI applauds the CDC’s efforts to better reflect the geographic impact of the HIV epidemic with its 2012 prevention awards.