During the roughly two and a half hour meeting on Friday evening, representatives from the Obama Administration listened passively and took notes as roughly 70 Bay Area residents offered their two cents on how a national HIV/AIDS policy should be drafted.
Jeffrey Crowley, director of the Office of National AIDS Policy, briefly spoke before turning the stage over to the audience at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus. It was the eighth of 13 community nationwide discussions in President Obama’s National HIV/AIDS Strategy.
The most popular suggestions included special consideration for the black community, which has been disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS. Several speakers want the federal government to declare a national state of emergency for the black community.
Though just 13 percent of the U.S. population is black, 51 percent of new HIV diagnoses were in black men, women, and children, according to a 2007 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Many, like Brian Basinger, spoke about homelessness and the need to have “housing first,” in order to “allow us to be human beings just like you.”
Including housing as part of a national AIDS strategy was echoed by a large number of the speakers, particularly those working or accessing services from the AIDS Housing Alliance.
Speakers said that homelessness destabilized their lives and made it hard to keep up with medications, and reduce stress and infection. Others remarked on the connections between homelessness, drug addiction, and HIV/AIDS, as well as suggesting 120 days notice required to evict the disabled.
Crowley said the administration hoped to continue the Ryan White program, the largest federal program for HIV/AIDS patients. Around since 1990, it is slated to expire at the end of the month, and noted that San Francisco has been an “epicenter of the epidemic.”
Speakers were wide-ranging: young and old, black, white, Latino, Philipino, Asian Indian, straight, gay, and transgender. They included nurses, attorneys, doctors, counselors, and formerly undocumented immigrants, as well as one woman who said she contracted HIV in utero and another who became positive at age 61.
Many were frank about sexual orientation and HIV status, and a large proportion stated that they had the virus.
Decriminalization of drug addiction, national needle exchange, hepatitis C, and youth infection and youth homelessness were also weaved into the discussion, as was the aging population of HIV positive people in San Francisco.
Several speakers worried about the lack of education, whether that was at the high school level, for HIV positive mothers, or for overlooked minorities such as in the Asian-Pacific Islander communities. There were several calls for a national standard for education in schools to replace or supplement the locally-determined sex and drug education.
Crowley will be back Nov. 1 to receive public comment in Oakland, thought the specific location has yet to be announced. He also said that the public was invited to submit comment through the White House website until Nov. 13 and that the video from the community meetings would be uploaded to their website.
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