NNPA Commentary Series

Nobody Should Have to Die Like This

By Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Until the government is willing to spend as much money on AIDS and education as it does on searching for Osama bin Laden, then I'm going to keep preaching what I'm preaching.

The United States has promised money for the AIDS pandemic that the United Nations has called the world’s worst health crisis. But the United States won’t deliver any money unless the country, the program, the people or the recipients of the U.S. aid subscribe to the insane policy of “abstinence only!”

We are still fixated on who is sleeping with whom while people are dying like flies! As soon as you are willing to develop every child's brain instead of destroying Saddam Hussein, then I'm going to keep preaching what I'm preaching.

“Herman,” our first congregation member to die of AIDS had me over to his home to confide in me about his condition. We sat in his three-story home with nothing left but the carpet on the floor. His wife had packed up the children and all of their belongings while he was at work and left him with nothing in the home but his carpet. She did not want to be around him, nor did she want their children around him because he had AIDS. “Herman” said to me: “Nobody should have to die like this, Rev!” I knew in my heart and mind from that day that our church had to do something about AIDS He was absolutely right. He is still right! I made up in my mind on that day that no person in our congregation who was living with AIDS would ever die like that again.

The United Church of Christ has been the “whipping boy” for the conservative, right-wing press and public when it decided to ordain homosexuals into the Christian ministry, so I was not concerned about the stigma an AIDS Ministry might bring on our congregation. I don’t do the ministry, however, to what the public thinks or the press thinks. I do ministry, and we do ministry as a congregation because of what the Prince of Peace thinks!

The black community was slow to respond to the epidemic that has swept across this country for over a quarter of a century because the epidemic was branded as a White-male homosexual disease. And because many black Christian families believe in their heart of hearts that AIDS is God’s curse upon the homosexual, those churches and the larger community were slow to respond. Homosexuals were seen as “outside of the veil” of the black community. We are doing a little bit better now. We are doing less than one percent of what we could be doing. But the response is much better especially since the pandemic has begun to affect heterosexual African-American females. If we’re going to catch up, I think the religious community needs to do several things.

First, it needs to educate its pastors and its congregations that the reality of HIV/AIDS is a biological problem, not a theological problem. It is a medical issue, not a moral issue. The religious community needs to make that message loud and clear across denominational lines.

The religious community needs to stamp out ignorance among its constituents and help the public come to grips with how this disease is transmitted. The religious community also needs to hold workshops and teach-ins with its members of all ages, even its seniors about sexually transmitted diseases and how HIV/AIDS is spread. One of the T-shirts that I saw back in the 1980s says it all:

NNPA Commentary Series

HIV/AIDS Numbers Worse Than Previously Thought

By Donna Christian-Christensen

A new report on the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic will soon be released by the Department of Health and Human Services and is expected to convey that the new HIV/AIDS case estimates are 50 percent higher than previously believed by federal health officials. This new information demands greater national attention and action.

Unlike the United States, other nations – such as many in the Caribbean and in sub-Saharan Africa – have national plans to address HIV/AIDS and are starting to see results. In fact, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) recently reported lower HIV/AIDS numbers in the global community; changes that are due to better reporting and surveillance. And while they do not suggest that 33 million – instead of 39 million – global HIV/AIDS cases is acceptable, they do indicate that attention to the global pandemic – though still flawed -- has yielded positive results.

Like the global pandemic, the response to domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic is under-funded. Additionally, HIV/AIDS has hit racial and ethnic minorities, particularly African-Americans and Hispanics hard; a point that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and others have consistently raised with the president and their colleagues in Congress.

Those efforts led to the creation of the Minority AIDS Initiative (MAI) in 1998, and continued with increasing that funding from $158 million to over $400 million over the last eight years. As the impact of HIV/AIDS on the African-American community worsened, the CBC and its AIDS advocacy partners called for greater attention and action to address the domestic epidemic. Additionally, we have consistently asked the Administration to target funding to the hardest hit communities to build capacity as the Minority HIV/AIDS Initiative called for. They have refused!

Today, nearly seven in 10 new AIDS cases are among African-Americans or Latinos. Not only are they disproportionately more likely to have an AIDS diagnosis, they also are more likely than their White counterparts to die from AIDS. More than half (55 percent) and 14 percent of all AIDS deaths currently occur among African- Americans and Latinos, respectively. Additionally, African-American and Latino female teenagers, aged 13 to 19 years of age, account for nearly 9 in 10 (86 percent) new AIDS cases among that population group.

While some blame lifestyle decisions and poor HIV education on the rising numbers of domestic HIV/AIDS cases, responsibility must be placed where it belongs: on the current Administration. From 2002 to 2007, President Bush has decreased domestic HIV/AIDS by 19 percent.

The silver lining is that what we are likely to hear in January or February of 2008 ought to galvanize the African-American community to demand an immediate and adequate response from the local, state and federal government. In fact, some communities are already launching initiatives to wrest their communities from the grip of the virus.

The CBC has requested meeting with CDC officials to preview the report to ensure a full and accurate reporting of the new numbers. And, as the CBC prepares for the second session of the 110th Congress, we will implement the recommendations of the recent NBLCA Summit with Black Clergy.

We will also use the milestone 10th anniversary of the MAI in 2008 to again declare a State of Emergency for HIV/AIDS in African-Americans and demand a national plan – including a Public Health Emergency Fund – to finally and adequately address the epidemic.

The 19th annual World AIDS Day was observed on Dec. 1, 2007. We are now more than 26 years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Every report shows that the goal of a world free of AIDS can be achieved with a real commitment and adequate funding from all stakeholders and those affected. It is a promise we must make to ourselves, each other and to future generations.

2008 Presidential Campaign

Make Them Hear You

By Phill Wilson

One of my favorite Broadway musicals is “Ragtime,” the story of a Black man who, after being humiliated by a racist fireman, decides to fight for justice. Right before his death, at the end of the show, Coalhouse Walker admonishes his followers to “make them hear you.” “If you make them hear you,” he says, “than we will be victorious.”

Can someone explain to me how the political pundits get off writing off the presidential campaigns before most black folks have a chance to make our voices heard?

Let me break it down for you. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the total U.S. population is a little over 300 million. The combined population for Iowa and New Hampshire is 4.5 million. About 38 million black people live in America, of whom only about 90,000 live in Iowa and New Hampshire. So that means that a mere 1.5 percent of all Americans have had a chance to vote, and less than three tenths of one percent of Black people have had that opportunity.

Black people can’t let the pundits or the media call this election before we’ve made our voices heard. The race has now moved to Michigan, Nevada and most importantly South Carolina, where over 50 percent of those voting in the Democratic primary are likely to be black. Next up will be Tsunami Tuesday, when California, Illinois, New York and others will vote. This is where it gets fun for black people. Every Democratic campaign is going to want our vote. (The Republicans seem far less interested in getting black votes. Remember the presidential debate on black issues that Tavis Smiley moderated back in September? Well, none of the leading candidates at the time -- John McCain, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, or Fred Thompson – bothered to show. Of the current front-runners, only Mike Huckabee attended.)

But whomever you vote for, we must make America hear us loud and clear. No one should be allowed to take our vote for granted. If a candidate wants us to help him or her get into the White House, he or she has to pay the price. They must have campaign offices in our neighborhoods. They need to sponsor events that focus on issues of particular import to Black people—sub prime mortgages, Rockefeller drug laws, three strikes, and HIV/AIDS. Given the impact HIV/AIDS is having on Black America, any candidate interested in the health and well being of Black people should sponsor an AIDS forum or town hall meeting before Feb. 5, two days before National Black HIV/AIDS Day. Not to do so sends a powerful message that they don’t really care about us.

Forget what the pundits say. Far from being over, for black folk, the 2008 race for the White House is only just beginning.

Make them hear you.

“…sometimes there are battles
That are more than black or white...
Teach every child to raise his voice
And then, my brothers, then
Will justice be demanded
By ten million righteous men.
Make them hear you.”
Coalhouse Walker — “Ragtime”

2007 National HIV Prevention Conference

How the New HIV U.S. Estimates Will Be Decided

By Sharon Egiebor

ATLANTA – The number of people in the United States who are living with HIV is higher than the estimated 40,000 annual new infections, but exactly how high is unclear. The numbers are up for discussion following the CDC’s decision to use new methodology to calculate the extent of the U.S. HIV epidemic.

“The ‘confusion of the numbers’ is the challenge of the disease. A lot of people do not know they are infected,” said Jennifer Kates, HIV policy director for the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It is a disease challenge. We can’t test everybody in the United States or around the world. It is expensive, and it might take 20 years to do. We have to rely on methods that make the best estimates possible.”

Several newspapers, including The Washington Blade and the Washington Post, citing unnamed federal sources and others familiar with the results of the new methodology, say the number is now between 55,000 and 60,000 people.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported for more than a decade that the number of new U.S. HIV infections was stable at the estimated 40,000.

This change in U.S. estimates comes on the heels of UNAIDS report that said fewer people than expected worldwide are living with HIV. The United Nation now says there are about 33.2 million people living with HIV and an estimated 2.5 million people were newly infected in 2007. Previously, the U.N. estimated there were 39.5 million, or about 16 percent more people worldwide.

“The single biggest reason for this reduction was the intensive exercise to assess India’s HIV epidemic, which resulted in a major revision of that country’s estimates. Important revisions of estimates elsewhere, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, also contributed. Of the total difference in the estimates published in 2006 and 2007, 70 percent are due to changes in six countries: Angola, India, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, the report states.

In both Kenya and Zimbabwe, there is increasing evidence that a proportion of the declines is due to a reduction of the number of new infections which is in part due to a reduction in risky behaviours,” the report said.

Dr. Kevin Fenton, the CDC’s director of National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention, said he would not release specific numbers or discuss the data until the methodology and the process of extrapolating the new statistics underwent a “rigorous, independent, scientific peer review.”

“The new estimates utilize complex methods based on a number of statistical assumptions,” Fenton said during a news conference at the 2007 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta. “Any modification to those assumptions during the scientific review process will affect the final estimates. It would not be responsible for CDC to discuss specific data before we are certain that the new estimates are reliable.”

Kates, said there are several reasons the numbers may be are higher than previously estimated. These could include the fact the size of the U.S. population has grown since the estimate was made in the 1990s, the estimated 40,000 was made too late, and HIV numbers are increasing, she said.

“We don’t know how those factors will figure into the estimates,” she said. “At the time the [estimates] were created, we had a very different HIV landscape. The tools that were used then to measure HIV were based on a very different trajectory of the disease. This was the pre-antiretroviral and pre-HAART [Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy] days. In the early 1990s, we thought we had a much clearer understanding between HIV infection and the development of AIDS. That has all changed.”