“The county is taking steps that if he gets out, we will file a civil matter to make sure he takes his medications,” Ghosh told The American Independent.

Ghosh was speaking of the Comstock Park man who turned himself in to Grand Rapids police Dec. 22, alleging he attempted to infect hundreds of people with HIV through unprotected sex and sharing needles. He was placed in a psychiatric hold for two days, and on Dec. 24, he was arraigned on the first of two charges of failing to disclose his status to a sex partner. Several days later, prosecutors added a second charge of failing to disclose. He is currently in Ypsilanti undergoing a psychiatric evaluation to determine if he can stand trial. He is being held on a $100,000 bond.

TAI does not identify the names of those charged with HIV disclosure laws unless both the accused and the accuser are named in court documents, or one or both provide TAI permission to publish their names.

The case, media releases and subsequent reporting have resulted in what experts have told TAI were “sensationalist” reports in the wider media.

But this is the first time county officials have indicated plans on how to deal with the man if he is released on bond.

The announcement, however, has HIV advocates worried.

“Forcing anyone to take treatment is a slippery slope,” said Sean Strub, co-chair of the Global Network of People with AIDS, North America (GNP+), in an email. “This person’s most important health issue seems to be his mental health, not his viral status. Forcing anti-retroviral treatment on anyone is a slippery slope. Once the camel’s nose gets inside that tent, even in such a rare and bizarre circumstance as this peculiar case, it is not such a huge step to mandatory testing and treatment for an ever-expanding number of people with HIV.”

While the advent of antiretroviral medications in the mid-1990s resulted in a staggering revival of persons living with AIDS and s sharp decrease in AIDS-related deaths, the drugs themselves are quite toxic and cause a host of side effects. In addition, scientists are not in agreement as to when is the appropriate point in clinical progression to begin treatment, resulting in many mixed messages to patients.

Michigan does have a part of the state health code that allows health officials to declare a person a health threat to others (HTTO). HTTOs are a civil action and can amount to anything from counseling to forced civil confinement for as long as six months. TAI reported in December that many people thought the law was being abused when it was revealed that any HIV-positive person who was diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection was immediately issued an HTTO. In other instances, women who became pregnant were issued HTTO orders and HIV-positive people who were named in partner services programs were also targeted for HTTO orders. The state, which oversees the HTTO list, denies pregnant women were targeted but said the STI and partner services programs were appropriate uses of the state’s name-based HIV list.

“[The suspect] does not have an airborne disease spread through casual contact; he has a disease that, regardless of treatment, is not easily transmitted. Even without treatment, the primary routes of infection — unprotected anal or vaginal sex — result in HIV transmission roughly one percent or less of the time,” said Catherine Hanssens, executive director of the Center for HIV Law and Policy. “So the threat of mandatory treatment is not a reflection of any danger [the suspect] poses, but of Ms.Ghosh’s dangerous misapprehension of both HIV transmission and the law governing the very limited circumstances under which treatment of an individual can be mandated.”

Photo: Kent County, Mich. logo (www.accesskent.com)

AIDS Drug Assistance Programs, known as ADAP, are a nationwide payer of last resort for people who cannot afford their HIV/AIDS medications. They have been in a funding crisis since 2010, which prompted many states, including Florida, to implement cost containment measures such as waiting lists.

Nationwide, according to the State and Territorial AIDS Directors (PDF), there are now more than 4,300 individuals in 12 states on AIDS Drug Assistance Program waiting lists.

The ADAP Crisis Task Force, convened by the Directors, announced Monday a “new discount/rebate and price freeze, available to all state ADAPs,” with ViiV Healthcare, a company focusing on HIV/AIDS treatment that was created by GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer in 2009.

The Task Force writes that it has “secured significant multi-year, voluntary discounts and rebates from all eight manufacturers of HIV antiretroviral (ARV) medications, with many of them providing price freezes for ADAPs through 2013.”

Florida’s Bureau of HIV/AIDS (PDF) listed 979 people on its ADAP waiting list as of Dec. 9; more than 470 of those people live in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.

Michigan is one state that has been host to repeated violations of HIV-positive persons’ rights, as has been frequently documented by The American Independent’s former sister site The Michigan Messenger. And a recent study into the application of Michigan’s HIV disclosure laws has uncovered policies in some local health jurisdictions that experts say are troubling in their implications to reproductive freedom and personal privacy.

Trevor Hoppe, a Ph.D. candidate in women’s studies and sociology at University of Michigan, has been conducting extensive interviews with local health department officials about how they have been applying state laws related to HIV. In the course of that study, Hoppe identified several health departments that are using pregnancy, partner-notification services, and sexually transmitted infection (STI) reports to initiate what’s known as “health threat to others” actions (HTTO). To ensure the anonymity of the respondents, Hoppe’s study did not identify specific health departments or counties where these policies were uncovered.

HTTO is a state law that allows health officials to intervene in the private lives of people who have serious infectious diseases. The initiation of an HTTO starts with a formal cease and desist letter with a demand for the person in question to appear at the local health department on a specific date. From there, health officials can do anything from prescribing counseling to seeking a court order to civilly confine a person for as long as six months.

Issuance of an HTTO order is also documented in a statewide database. That database is coded, but it is names-based and accessible to any health official in the state. A person remains in that database indefinitely – until the HTTO order is lifted by local and state health officials. And sometimes it’s never lifted.

Hoppe presented the results of his (currently unpublished) study in August at the 2011 National HIV Prevention Conference (PDF), held in Atlanta. Among the results, he found that two health departments were starting HTTO actions against HIV-positive women after knowing only two things about these women: They were pregnant; they were HIV-positive. The assumption underlying the HTTO actions against them was that the women engaged in behavior that would lead to a significant risk of HIV transmission in others.

What makes a human a ‘health threat’?

Joshua Moore, who runs Detroit Legal Services, a law firm focused on HIV issues and the law, told The American Independent that the policy of labeling people as ‘health threats’ with insufficient evidence is problematic for many reasons.

“The obvious concern is that the pregnant HIV-positive woman is not a ‘health threat to others’ based on the fact that she is simply HIV-positive,” Moore said. “This concept is just outrageous. Many HIV-positive women are choosing to have children safely and are not putting anyone at risk for contracting HIV. The fathers of these children are either HIV-positive themselves or are aware of their partners’ HIV status.”

These health departments have taken up this HTTO policy against pregnant HIV-positive women in spite of recent studies that have shown that in serodiscordant couples (where one partner is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative), the use of successful antiretroviral treatment reduces the risk of infection by 96 percent. In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta reports the risk of HIV transmission to newborn babies is reduced to less than 2 percent for pregnant women who are on successful treatment during pregnancy, labor, and delivery and if babies are immediately treated with the medications. Even starting treatment only at labor and delivery reduces the risk of transmission to under 10 percent.

Nicole Seguin, of the Positive Women’s Network, told TAI that the kind of policy highlighted in Hoppe’s study is troubling. As an HIV-positive woman who chose to have a child while positive, Seguin said she worked very closely with her doctor and staff to ensure a safe pregnancy.

“The circumstance of a woman’s HIV status should not allow for an initiation of a ‘health threat to others’ action and diminish the responsibility doctors have to adequately explain medical choices to his patient so that she is comfortable and can consent to all procedures and interventions during pregnancy and birth,” Seguin said. “It erodes women’s reproductive rights by taking away the medical choices that every person is entitled to simply because the woman is living with HIV, and pregnant.”

Similar actions occurred in Mississippi until the U.S. Department of Justice intervened and ordered the state to stop directing people with HIV not to have children.

“Pregnancy in and of itself is not a sufficient reason to define an individual as a ‘health threat,’” said Angela Minicuci, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH). “Local health departments carefully evaluate individual cases in order to determine whether they should be considered ‘health threats,’ as defined by statute, and if they are, appropriate action to be undertaken. We are not aware of action being taken against HIV-positive women for getting pregnant.”

Violation of privacy

In addition to the pregnant women being targeted, a more dangerous activity from public health officials was uncovered by Hoppe. Under Michigan law, the names of all people who test positive for HIV are reported to the MDCH. They are kept in a centralized, coded database. While the move to the names-based reporting was mandated by the CDC and fought by those living with HIV, the state assured the database would be used only as a list of those living with the virus.

What Hoppe discovered was that health officials were comparing the names of individuals named in partner services counseling with the state database. Partner-notification services are voluntary, and the state mandates only that the assistance to contact partners at risk be offered. The counseling session often happens at the same time a person is diagnosed with HIV or another STI. That period can be one of deep trauma, and many advocates have argued the counseling programs can turn coercive.

Hoppe found that when a person tests positive for HIV, health officials in at least three jurisdictions will solicit names as part of partner-notification services. With a list of names in hand, health officials will compare that list to the state database, and if any name on the partner-notification list pops up on the statewide list, health officials will initiate an HTTO action against that person.

“Anytime a government agency uses names inappropriately, it is a threat to the civil liberties of those with HIV, as well as those who are not infected with HIV,” said attorney Moore. “Often, partner notification laws are abused by individuals. Issuing an HTTO to a person simply because they were mentioned in a partner notification and are in the state database would not mean that individual is an automatic HTTO. To suggest that anyone would automatically be a HTTO under these circumstances is an extreme scenario.”

Perpetuating the criminalization of HIV-positives

The final stunning discovery from Hoppe’s study is that some local health departments have begun initiating HTTO actions against HIV-positive persons who test positive for other sexually transmitted infections.

Hoppe quoted “Fern,” an anonymous disease investigator from a local health department, in his PowerPoint presentation at the HIV conference earlier this year.

“Well, usually it’s all the sudden their name appears with another STD… So… if the [syphilis coordinator] has any syphilis cases where they’re also showing that they’re HIV-positive, then her and I work together and we – you know, if I’ve got a case report – then it goes to a ‘health threat to others,’ more or less. Because if they come up with syphilis, they’re having unprotected sex.”

But that’s false logic. What distinguishes syphilis from other STDs is that it can be spread by skin-to skin contact. Thus, contrary to Fern’s conclusions, a syphilis infection does not necessarily indicate unprotected sex.

Minicuci, of the state health department, said Hoppe’s findings in relation to STIs and partner-notification services are accurate.

“Under the Michigan Public Health Code and Administrative Rules, public health is permitted to use available disease reporting records to aid in disease investigation and to support prevention,” she told TAI. “Michigan’s Public Health Code grants public health the ability to prevent and control disease, including collecting information, case investigation, and action to prevent the spread of disease. Confidentiality of all reports, records and data pertaining to testing, care, treatment, reporting, research, and information pertaining to partner notification activities is, however, protected by law (MCL 333.5131 (7)).”

This news comes as some states are seeking permission to use results of viral load tests and immune function tests to track down people with HIV who may not be on medications or who have developed resistance to their HIV medications. Such a proposal in New York state has activists there rattled. The Obama administration’s National HIV/AIDS Strategy called for the monitoring and collection of these test results with the theory that reduction in community viral load will lead to reduced new infections.

Though Michigan has collected these results for years, Minicuci said the results are not used to track down individuals.

“Currently MDCH collects HIV viral load, western blot, and CD4 results for epidemiological surveillance of HIV disease in Michigan,” she said. “Physicians will follow up with their patients on any positive HIV test results (such as a detectable viral load and reactive western blot) and will then report that case to the MDCH for the epidemiological surveillance. Additionally, viral load (detectable and undetectable) and CD4 results are aggregated and used to identify areas of the state where there may be gaps in service for persons living with HIV. This helps us to make well-informed funding decisions.”

Mark Peterson, a director of the Michigan Positive Action Coalition (MI-POZ), said the study’s discoveries are “disturbing” in how they malign people with HIV but not people who regularly contract other STDs.

“How often does public health in Michigan apply health threat measures against someone who has repeated STIs that don’t include HIV?” Peterson said. “Conversely, how often are the same measures applied when HIV in present?

“Our public health messages have stated that people with HIV can live long and happy lives, that HIV is no more of a health consequence than diabetes, yet continued stigma related policies show that this is not actually the real case,” he continued. “If presence of HIV is the main reason that health threat cases are begun, then what we’re doing is criminalizing HIV and those living with it. We can’t say something is ‘chronic and manageable’ and then go to the extremes in health threat cases. People with HIV need comprehensive and compassionate care that includes individualized education, counseling and skills building on how to keep themselves from getting another STD because it is bad for their health. They don’t deserve to be labeled as imminent public threats simply because they have a virus, while the individuals who continually get other STIs are held harmless.”

Peterson was not alone in raising concerns about the local health departments’ actions.

Catherine Hanssens, executive director of the Center for HIV Law & Policy in New York, told TAI that the discoveries highlighted in Hoppe’s study have troubling implications.

“All women retain the constitutionally protected right to reproductive choice, including the right to bear a child, and this right is not affected by an HIV diagnosis,” she said. “Similarly, a policy that treats evidence that a person with HIV is sexually active as tantamount to positing a HTTO, without more [evidence], likely is a violation to the related right to sexual expression and intimacy. The fact that cooperation with partner-notification services can lead to intrusive government actions against a partner raises serious public health and privacy issues.”

Sean Strub, founding publisher of POZ Magazine and a board member of the Global Network of People with HIV North America, echoed Hanssens’ concerns.

“This is about punishing people with HIV for being sexual – that’s the real agenda here,” Strub said. “These are horrible, but increasingly typical, examples of how people with HIV are increasingly treated as a problem population to be tagged, regulated, controlled and criminalized. … Using the excuse of public health to oppress people is not new. The Nazis were pioneers in this regard. It is unfortunate to see Michigan officials following their lead.”

Photo: Flickr/Monifoto.net

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) introduced House Resolution 3324, or the “Real Education for Healthy Youth Act” into both chambers of Congress on Wednesday. The bill would require student instruction on both abstinence and contraception. Information taught to youth and young adults will have to be “medically accurate and complete,” meaning the information provided to students will have been verified and supported by scientific research. This bill also prevents federally funded programs from withholding “life-saving” information about the efficacy of using condoms and other contraceptives correctly and consistently.

“Research has shown programs that combine information about abstinence and contraception effectively delay the onset of sexual intercourse, reduce the number of sexual partners, and increase contraceptive use among teens,” said Lee in a statement introducing the bill. “These programs also reduce unintended pregnancy and the transmission of STIs, including HIV.”

“Growing up isn’t easy and our kids find themselves in tough situations every day,” said Lautenberg.  “They need all the information to make smart choices and ‘abstinence-only’ programs don’t work.  It’s time to bring sex education up-to-date to reflect the real life situations facing young Americans.”

The “Real Education for Healthy Youth Act” is a follow-up to H.R. 1085, or the “Repealing Ineffective and Incomplete Abstinence-Only Program Funding Act of 2011,” which was introduced by Lee and Lautenberg earlier this year. That bill, which has 44 co-sponsors in the House and 10 in the Senate, would simply eliminate funding for abstinence-only education programs, while the “Real Education” bill goes into great detail about what sex-ed programs will have to address in order to receive federal money.

Specifically, the bill would prevent federal dollars from funding health-education programs that:

• “deliberately withhold life-saving information about HIV”;
• “are medically inaccurate or have been scientifically shown to be ineffective”;
• “promote gender stereotypes”;
• “are insensitive and unresponsive to the needs of sexually active youth or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender youth”; or
• “are inconsistent with the ethical imperatives of medicine and public health.”

Grant proposals would be evaluated by the the Office of Adolescent Health and would be rewarded to groups proposing “comprehensive sex education,” defined as a program that includes age- and developmentally-appropriate information on a range of topics related to sexuality and human development, including: relationships, decision-making, communication, abstinence, contraception, disease, pregnancy-prevention, gender identity, sexual orientation, dating violence and bullying. All information must be inclusive of lesbian, gay bisexual, transgender and straight people. Sex-education under this bill would be extended to university-age people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would be involved establishing a common set of performance measures to evaluate the effectiveness of grant projects funded through this legislation.

The bill makes note of the “rights of young people to information in order to make healthy and responsible decisions about their sexual health.”

In September, Lee introduced legislation aimed at addressing the ongoing criminalization of persons living with HIV infection. Monica Rodriguez, president and CEO of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), told The American Independent Lee and Lautenberg’s new bill attempts to address the stigma that many persons infected with HIV face in our society.

“It’s problematic when we put the burden on others and it’s dis-empowering … to HIV-infected or people infected with other sexually transmitted diseases,” said Rodriguez, a sexuality educator. “Good sexuality helps people to understand their responsibility to protect themselves.”

SIECUS is among several reproductive-rights and LGBT-advocacy groups that are supporting the “Real Education” bill, including Advocates for Youth, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, NARAL Pro-Chocie America, the Guttmacher Institute, the Human Rights Campaign and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Rodriguez said the bill will likely see opposition from organizations that support and benefit from abstinence-only education funding, but certain provisions, she said, should not be negotiable.

“It is unethical not to provide young people with life saving information” Rodriguez said. “Sexual education needs to be based on science and data and reality as opposed to our fantasy about how we wish the world was. We have issues and this bill attempts to address some of them.”

The Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, spurred by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), was formerly launched Thursday during a press briefing on Capitol Hill. U.S. Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) joined Lee and White House officials, experts and advocacy leaders in introducing the caucus and its funding proposals. No members of the Minnesota congressional delegation are involved.

“I remember when having AIDS was a death sentence,” McDermott said, noting that the new caucus was the most significant AIDS-prevention effort since the Bush administration’s AIDS task force. “Believe me, there will be people looking at the AIDS budget [who will say], ‘Why are we putting money into that [during this] fiscal crisis.”

Franks identified himself as one of the most fiscally-conservative members of the House as a way of explaining why he supported the caucus’ AIDS-prevention efforts.

U.S. Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduce Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus.

“My two top priorities as co-chair of the HIV/AIDS Caucus are to better enable faith-based organizations to implement life-saving medical services and to make significant strides so no child is born with HIV after 2015, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to bring attention to this important humanitarian issue,” he said.

Lee said the caucus will focus funding attention on the most vulnerable communities in the country, many of which are communities of color.

“This is the launch time for a bold movement to stamp HIV and AIDS, for once and for all, off the face of the earth,” said Lee, who has been working on AIDS-prevention efforts for the past three decades and managed to get the travel ban repealed in order to secure the International AIDS Conference in the U.S., to be held in Washington, D.C., in July 2012.

No mention was made of federal legislation Lee is currently working on to repeal state laws that criminalize individuals with HIV. The Iowa Independent’s sister site The Michigan Messenger has extensively reported on cases where HIV-positive individuals have been charged with felonies, such as the case of Daniel Allen from Clinton Township, Mich., who in 2009 was charged with bio-terrorism for biting his neighbor during what Allen alleged was a violent anti-gay attack. Because he was HIV-positive, Allen was charged with one count of “possession of use of a harmful device” in addition to various assault counts. The following year, the bio-terrorism charge was dropped, and Allen was sentenced to probation.

Lee’s communications director, Kristal DeKleer, told The Independent that Lee’s legislation, currently known as the “Repeal HIV Discrimination Act,” is still in the drafting stage. Currently, 34 states, including Iowa, have criminal statutes based on exposure to HIV.

In response to a direct question about HIV criminalization, Jeffrey Crowley, director of the Office of National AIDS Policy at the White House, said the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — as part of the Obama administration’s National HIV/AIDS strategy introduced in 2010 and updated this past June — are currently gathering data to come up with a public-health approach of dealing with HIV disclosure laws. Ultimately, though, Crowley said it is a state issue and did not comment on Lee’s not-yet-introduced federal bill.

Crowley told The Independent that the CDC and the National Institutes of Health are prioritizing funding on research that targets populations, such as gay and bisexual men, identified as being at the greatest risk for contracting HIV, in addition to geographic areas where prevalence is highest. He said new information has led the CDC to change priorities (PDF), for example, shifting prevention efforts away from those who are HIV-negative to those who are HIV-positive.

Crowley said efforts are being made to strike a balance between what is better for the health and well-being of the individual HIV patient in addition to preventing others from being infected. He noted anti-retroviral treatment is always voluntary (though there have been instances where prisons have violated HIV-positive protocol) and said he thinks some groups have mischaracterized the federal government’s perceived intent of putting the interest of the nation over infected individuals, but Crowley emphasized it is better to treat patients early “before their immune system is damaged.”

The three caucus members said Thursday the goal is to have 6 million HIV-positive Americans in treatment by 2013.

Tinselyn Simms-Hall, policy and advocacy coordinator of The Women’s Collective, a D.C.-based AIDS-prevention advocacy group, told The Independent she hopes the increased HIV/AIDS-prevention funding reaches women in proportion to their infection rates. She said national focus is often on men who have sex with men, which sometimes prevents other at-risk groups from realizing they are at risk.

“AIDS has a huge impact on heterosexuality,” Simms-Hall said. “There is a large community of women affected [by this virus] who don’t realize there are resources out there.”

Brandon Macsata, chief executive of the ADAP Advocacy Association, told The Independent that the organization “asked people to start at 7 a.m. [Thursday] and continue through 7 p.m. [Thursday] and to target the campaign toward President Obama and ask him to step up and begin to lead on this crisis.”

“We feel that to this point he’s been pretty quiet,” Macsata said, “and when we’re approaching 10,000 people on the waiting list for the medication we know will keep them healthy productive members of their communities, it’s just unacceptable.”

The AIDS Drug Assistance Program (known as ADAP) provides medications for the treatment of HIV and AIDS for people who cannot afford to pay because they are unemployed, uninsured or under-insured. It has been in a funding crisis for the past few years.

The National Alliance of States and Territorial AIDS Directors’ latest ADAP Watch (.pdf) indicates that as of last week at least 9,000 people in 11 states were on a waiting list.

In Iowa, the ADAP program has been closed to new enrollments since July 2009. Last summer, advocates rallied at the Iowa Capitol to bring awareness to those who remain on waiting lists.

The Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, spurred by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), was formerly launched Thursday during a press briefing on Capitol Hill. U.S. Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) joined Lee and White House officials, experts and advocacy leaders in introducing the caucus and its funding proposals.

“I remember when having AIDS was a death sentence,” McDermott said, noting that the new caucus was the most significant AIDS-prevention effort since the Bush administration’s AIDS task force. “Believe me, there will be people looking at the AIDS budget [who will say], ‘Why are we putting money into that [during this] fiscal crisis.”

Franks identified himself as one of the most fiscally-conservative members of the House as a way of explaining why he supported the caucus’ AIDS-prevention efforts.

U.S. Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduce Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus. (Photo: Sofia Resnick/The American Independent)

“My two top priorities as co-chair of the HIV/AIDS Caucus are to better enable faith-based organizations to implement life-saving medical services and to make significant strides so no child is born with HIV after 2015, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to bring attention to this important humanitarian issue,” he said.

Lee said the caucus will focus funding attention on the most vulnerable communities in the country, many of which are communities of color.

“This is the launch time for a bold movement to stamp HIV and AIDS, for once and for all, off the face of the earth,” said Lee, who has been working on AIDS-prevention efforts for the past three decades and managed to get the travel ban repealed in order to secure the International AIDS Conference in the U.S., to be held in Washington, D.C., in July 2012.

No mention was made of federal legislation Lee is currently working on to repeal state laws that criminalize individuals with HIV. The Iowa Independent’s sister site The Michigan Messenger has extensively reported on cases where HIV-positive individuals have been charged with felonies, such as the case of Daniel Allen from Clinton Township, Mich., who in 2009 was charged with bio-terrorism for biting his neighbor during what Allen alleged was a violent anti-gay attack. Because he was HIV-positive, Allen was charged with one count of “possession of use of a harmful device” in addition to various assault counts. The following year, the bio-terrorism charge was dropped, and Allen was sentenced to probation.

Lee’s communications director, Kristal DeKleer, told The Independent that Lee’s legislation, currently known as the “Repeal HIV Discrimination Act,” is still in the drafting stage. Currently, 34 states, including Iowa, have criminal statutes based on exposure to HIV.

In response to a direct question about HIV criminalization, Jeffrey Crowley, director of the Office of National AIDS Policy at the White House, said the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — as part of the Obama administration’s National HIV/AIDS strategy introduced in 2010 and updated this past June — are currently gathering data to come up with a public-health approach of dealing with HIV disclosure laws. Ultimately, though, Crowley said it is a state issue and did not comment on Lee’s not-yet-introduced federal bill.

Crowley told The Independent that the CDC and the National Institutes of Health are prioritizing funding on research that targets populations, such as gay and bisexual men, identified as being at the greatest risk for contracting HIV, in addition to geographic areas where prevalence is highest. He said new information has led the CDC to change priorities (PDF), for example, shifting prevention efforts away from those who are HIV-negative to those who are HIV-positive.

Crowley said efforts are being made to strike a balance between what is better for the health and well-being of the individual HIV patient in addition to preventing others from being infected. He noted anti-retroviral treatment is always voluntary (though there have been instances where prisons have violated HIV-positive protocol) and said he thinks some groups have mischaracterized the federal government’s perceived intent of putting the interest of the nation over infected individuals, but Crowley emphasized it is better to treat patients early “before their immune system is damaged.”

The three caucus members said Thursday the goal is to have 6 million HIV-positive Americans in treatment by 2013.

Tinselyn Simms-Hall, policy and advocacy coordinator of The Women’s Collective, a D.C.-based AIDS-prevention advocacy group, told The Independent she hopes the increased HIV/AIDS-prevention funding reaches women in proportion to their infection rates. She said national focus is often on men who have sex with men, which sometimes prevents other at-risk groups from realizing they are at risk.

“AIDS has a huge impact on heterosexuality,” Simms-Hall said. “There is a large community of women affected [by this virus] who don’t realize there are resources out there.”

Amid constant congressional squabbling over spending and the deficit in Congress, 59 Democrats and Republicans have united in pledging to spend more money for research and prevention efforts to combat the spread of AIDS domestically and worldwide.

The Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, spurred by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), was formerly launched at a press briefing on Capitol Hill Thursday. Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) joined Lee and White House officials, experts and advocacy leaders in introducing the caucus and its funding proposals.

“I remember when having AIDS was a death sentence,” McDermott said, noting that the new caucus was the most significant AIDS-prevention effort since the Bush administration’s AIDS task force. “Believe me, there will be people looking at the AIDS budget [who will say], ‘Why are we putting money into that [during this] fiscal crisis,” McDermott said.

Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduce Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, Sept. 15, 2011 (AMERICAN INDEPENDENT/Sofia Resnick)

Franks identified himself as one of the most fiscally-conservative members of the House as a way of explaining why he supported the caucus’ AIDS-prevention efforts.

“My two top priorities as co-chair of the HIV/AIDS Caucus are to better enable faith-based organizations to implement life-saving medical services and to make significant strides so no child is born with HIV after 2015, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to bring attention to this important humanitarian issue,” he said.

Lee said the caucus will focus funding attention on the most vulnerable communities in the country, many of which are communities of color.

“This is the launch time for a bold movement to stamp HIV and AIDS, for once and for all, off the face of the earth,” said Lee, who has been working on AIDS-prevention efforts for the past three decades and managed to get the travel ban repealed in order to secure the International AIDS Conference in the U.S., to be held in Washington, D.C., in July 2012.

No mention was made of federal legislation Lee is currently working on to repeal state laws that criminalize individuals with HIV. The American Independent’s sister site The Michigan Messenger has extensively reported on cases where HIV-positive individuals have been charged with felonies, such as the case of Daniel Allen from Clinton Township, Mich., who in 2009 was charged with bio-terrorism for biting his neighbor during what Allen alleged was a violent anti-gay attack. Because he was HIV-positive, Allen was charged with one count of “possession of use of a harmful device” in addition to various assault counts. The following year, the bio-terrorism charge was dropped, and Allen was sentenced to probation.

One of Lee’s staffers told TAI that the representative’s legislation, currently known as the “Repeal HIV Discrimination Act,” is still in the drafting stage. Currently, 34 states have criminal statutes based on exposure to HIV.

In response to a direct question about HIV criminalization, Jeffrey Crowley, director of the Office of National AIDS Policy at the White House, said the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — as part of the Obama administration’s National HIV/AIDS strategy introduced in 2010 and updated this past June — are currently gathering data to come up with a public-health approach of dealing with HIV disclosure laws. Ultimately, though, Crowley said it is a state issue and did not comment on Lee’s not-yet-introduced federal bill.

Crowley told TAI that the CDC and the National Institutes of Health are prioritizing funding on research that targets populations, such as gay and bisexual men, identified as being at the greatest risk for contracting HIV, in addition to geographic areas where prevalence is highest. He said new information has led the CDC to change priorities (PDF), for example, shifting prevention efforts away from those who are HIV-negative to those who are HIV-positive.

Crowley said efforts are being made to strike a balance between what is better for the health and well-being of the individual HIV patient in addition to preventing others from being infected. He noted anti-retroviral treatment is always voluntary (though there have been instances where prisons have violated HIV-positive protocol) and said he thinks some groups have mischaracterized the federal government’s perceived intent of putting the interest of the nation over infected individuals, but Crowley emphasized it is better to treat patients early “before their immune system is damaged.”

The three caucus members said Thursday the goal is to support 6 million HIV-positive people worldwide* on treatment through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) by 2013.

Tinselyn Simms-Hall, policy and advocacy coordinator of The Women’s Collective, a D.C.-based AIDS-prevention advocacy group, told TAI she hopes the increased HIV/AIDS-prevention funding reaches women in proportion to their infection rates. She said national focus is often on men who have sex with men, which sometimes prevents other at-risk groups from realizing they are at risk.

“AIDS has a huge impact on heterosexuality,” Simms-Hall said. “There is a large community of women affected [by this disease] who don’t realize there are resources out there.”

*Correction: TAI previously reported that the HIV/AIDS Caucus’ goal was to have  6 million HIV-positive Americans in treatment by 2013; in fact, the goal is to support 6 million HIV-positive people worldwide on treatment. We regret the error.

The Papacy’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, this week published an editorial decrying the “failed utopia of sexual revolution” and suggested the policy will likely achieve the opposite of the desired effect, which is to reduce rates of unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STD) throughout the city, especially in Latino and African-American communities. The Vatican called the initiative “useless and even harmful.”

The new policy goes into effect this school year, which officially begins for students on Sept. 8, and requires schools to teach students in sixth grade and up sex education that includes instruction on abstinence, the risks of unprotected sex, puberty and pregnancy. The new rules also mandate the teaching of healthy eating and the importance of regular exercise and gives parents the option of opting-out their children from discussions of birth control methods.

The Vatican’s stance on the issue, as voiced by L’Osservatore Romano’s Lucetta Scaraffia, is that while unintended pregnancy, STDs and abortion are existing problems worldwide, sex education is not the answer, and, in fact, decreases their rates. Scaraffia compared New York to Italy, which she said is “better off” because there is no compulsory sex education in schools.

[H]ere young people have a lower risk of disease and early pregnancy. This is thanks to the family, to the loving vigilance of parents over their children, to the fact that kids are not left to themselves with a box of contraceptives as the only defense against their passions and mistakes.

[...]

It is not clear why public institutions in the West continue to have such magical trust in the effectiveness of sex education. After years of courses, focused, of course, on contraceptive methods, we see that – for example in the UK – boys and girls continue to have early sexual intercourse without any kind of protection, and the number of pregnancies and abortions among adolescents has multiplied. By now, it is clear that to avoid these tragedies it is not enough to explain to them how they can use contraceptives, and where to easily find them, but that the problem is further upstream, in education and in the family.

The Archdiocese of New York has also openly criticized the initiative, calling the citywide sex-ed mandate “troubling.”

New York’s new law standardizes public-school sex education curriculum, which has been taught in most schools in various forms. The new curriculum will be taught in sixth and seventh grades and again in ninth and 10th grades.

In the U.S., 21 states and the District of Columbia mandate some type of sex education, and 33 states and the District of Columbia mandate HIV education, according to the Guttmacher Institute (PDF). Thirty-seven states require that where sex education is provided, information on abstinence must be given: Of those states, 26 require that abstinence be stressed, and 11 states require that abstinence be covered.

Ultimately, Scaraffia notes, the Catholic Church will continue to teach and promote public policies promoting the idea that “sexual relations are much more than some kind of pleasurable exercise to be practiced in an unbridled and risk-free way.”

Peter LaBarbera’s Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH) last week launched a campaign to prevent gay men from donating blood. Keep the Gay Blood Ban (KGB²) was sparked, LaBarbera says, because of “renewed lobby efforts to open up the U.S. blood supply to homosexuality-practicing men.”

Since 1983*, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has banned blood donations frommen who have ever had sex with men and women who have ever had sex with men who have had sex with men. In 2010, 40 members of Congress called on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to lift the ban on gay men donating blood. However, LaBarbera only mentioned Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), “who represents the homosexual Boystown neighborhood in Chicago,” in hisKGB² launch article on AFTAH’s website.

Last year, the Advisory Committee on Blood Safety & Availability for HHS recommended the ban not be lifted, due to lack of sufficient data to support revising the policy. The committee did, however, recommend further research into a possible ban lift, at least for “low-risk” gay and bisexual men. And just last month HHS announced that following the studies’ completion, a comprehensive evidence-based policy evaluation will begin.

In Kerry’s original letter to the committee, he was joined by medical experts at the American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers and the American Medical Association in the position that the current blood donor policy (PDF) is discriminatory and “medically and scientifically unwarranted,” pointing out that heterosexual individuals who engage in risky sexual behavior are not subjected to a lifetime ban as gay men are. For example, heterosexual individuals who have had sex with HIV-positive individuals are only banned for a one-year period, as are heterosexual individuals who have had sex for money.

“Sadly, Sen. Kerry and others crusading against the homosexual blood ban do so on the basis that the ban is mainly about ‘anti-gay discrimination’ rather than preserving public health,” LaBarbera wrote in the article.

The thrust of LaBarbera’s call to continue banning gay men from donating blood is apubic health flier about anal sex between men (PDF) produced by Asian Health Services and funded by the California AIDS Clearinghouse.

The flier -– which graphically describes various sex practices and positions, accompanied by images of LEGO-style men demonstrating such positions — discusses health risks of oral, anal and oral-anal sex between men and speaks to the importance of using a condom to prevent the spread of disease.

LaBarbera implies that the transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases is common for all gay men, quoting from the flier: “Anal sex is the riskiest sexual activity for getting/spreading HIV.” He does not, however, quote the rest of that paragraph: “That risk goes up if you have more sex partners, if you f*** without a condom or if you have sex with someone who has HIV.”

LaBarbera writes:

[F]ew seem interested in investigating – much less restricting – the actual high-risk homosexual practices and deviant behaviors depicted and described in this (pro-‘gay’) flier, which crassly helps explain the immense heath [sic] risks of male homosexuality We excerpt this flier – vulgar slang references and all – to help educate the public as to how this lifestyle is so dangerous that men who practice it must be kept from the nation’s blood supply.

LaBarbera asks readers to contact their U.S. senators and representatives and ask them “to put the safety of Americans – and a pristine blood supply – ahead of the demands of the selfish Homosexuality Lobby.” He also wants congressional leaders to launch an investigation “into the health hazards of homosexual behaviors (just as the government studied the dangers of smoking).”

AFTAH defines itself as “a group dedicated to exposing the homosexual activist agenda.” Its nonprofit status was recently revoked by the Internal Revenue Service for failure to comply with IRS nonprofit filing requirements.

The Southern Poverty Law Center still defines AFTAH as a hate group (among 29 others in the Illinois, where the organization is based).

*Correction: TAI previously reported that the FDA banned gay men from donating blood, for a lifetime, in 1977. In fact, this policy on “men who have sex with other men” began in 1983; 1977 — deemed the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. — is the cutoff year for “men who have sex with other men.” In other words, men who stopped having sex with other men before 1977 can donate blood. We regret the error.