Kelly's Blog

What a headline! For the first time in history, our waiting lists have exceeded 4000 people who are waiting to receive life saving HIV medications.

Here is latest ADAP Watch from NASTAD:

http://www.nastad.org/Docs/Public/InFocus/20101029_ADAP%20Watch%20update%20-%2010.29.10.pdf

Now I would like to switch gears here just a bit and share something that I read last week. Brown University has won a $7.5-million, five-year federal grant to study how drinking alcohol affects people with HIV.

The money, from the National Institutes of Health, will establish the Brown Alcohol Research Center on HIV which will conduct several studies on how alcohol affects health and behavior. Peter Monti (professor and director of the new research center) said both alcohol and HIV weaken the brain and the liver. Alcohol use can also make a patient less likely to follow his or her medication regimen or to abstain from unsafe sex.

In other words, we know that alcohol is not good for you if you are HIV positive. You might not take your HIV medication. This research will look at how much if any you can safely drink. We also know that if you don’t take HIV medication, the vast majority will progress to full blown AIDS and face disability and/or death.

My point here is not to discourage research. It is to say very clearly that we have to get our priorities straight. What good is it to have a National AIDS Strategy if we can’t even have a strategy to allocate federal funds to the highest priority issues. Issues of how to fund the shortfall in ADAP are being debated in Congress with nobody denying it needs to be funded but disputing how it should be funded.

I realize that the federal government allocates money from different pots and it seems none of those pots are even on the same stove…

Furthermore, it has taken the intervention of NASTAD – National Alliance of State & Territorial AIDS Directors to get cost containment agreements with major pharmaceutical companies like Gilead, Boehringer Ingelheim and ViiV for ADAP.

So it seems we are still waiting for a comprehensive and workable National HIV/AIDS Strategy from our leaders in Washington.

While we wait, 4,157 people are waiting to receive life-saving medication.

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