Special Series: Meeting challenge of HIV epidemic in black community
Here are the CDC's plans for halting the HIV epidemic's spread; goals include ensuring all African Americans know their status
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of Atlanta, GA, issued a report on March 8, 2007, titled "A Heightened National Response to the HIV/AIDS Crisis Among African Americans."
Here, in a nutshell, are CDC's plans and commitments, contained within the report, as part of an effort to stop the epidemic from spreading among African Americans in the United States.
The CDC commits to the following:
- Expanding HIV prevention programs serving African Americans and enhancing culturally appropriate strategies for delivering services to this population;
- Training providers in community-based medical facilities that serve large numbers of African Americans;
- Expanding the availability of appropriate and targeted services to help prevent HIV infection in high-risk young men who have sex with men (MSM) of color, transgender persons, and their sexual partners;
- Providing funding and technical assistance to state and local health departments to enhance programs that aim to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV;
- Developing training curricula and providing training in HIV prevention interventions for African American females to encourage them to adopt and maintain behaviors that reduce their HIV risk;
- Working with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Labor, and other U.S. departments to make HIV prevention information more widely available to African American communities;
- Expanding investments and access to HIV testing for African Americans;
- Conducting trainings for African American medical providers and others serving large numbers of African Americans to increase HIV screening and testing in high-prevalence areas;
- Implementing HIV counseling and testing, STD screening and treatment, and hepatitis B vaccination in settings where African Americans congregate;
- Piloting separate campaigns that develop messages and promote HIV testing for MSM, women, youth, and heterosexual men;
- Working closely with HRSA and SAMHSA to ensure that HIV testing is integrated into a range of community-based services for vulnerable subpopulations of African American women, youth, children, and MSM;
- Convening a major meeting with leading researchers from the African American community to assess research gaps and future directions for intervention research;
- Initiating new research projects to test newly-developed, community-based, or adapted interventions for African Americans who are at increased risk for contracting or transmitting HIV;
- Expanding collaborations to evaluate innovative and potentially effective interventions developed by and for community-based organizations (CBOs) serving African Americans;
- Initiating research projects to identify cost-effective strategies for implementing high-quality HIV prevention interventions;
- Assessing the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of 1,600 African American students at historically black colleges and universities;
- Investigating prevention needs and strategies for HIV-infected and uninfected African American male prison inmates during transitions into and out of prison;
- Initiating a project to evaluate the effectiveness of prevention strategies for reaching and testing black MSM with previously undiagnosed HIV infection;
- Testing the feasibility of research techniques to reach bisexually active non-gay-identified African American MSM to increase HIV testing;
- Increasing the number of effective interventions used by CDC prevention partners by initiating the rapid dissemination of already proven and packaged interventions for African Americans who are at increased risk for acquiring or transmitting HIV;
- Directing funding so that effective HIV prevention interventions for African Americans can quickly be made available to AIDS service organizations (ASOs);
- Conducting a demonstration project for the Parents Matter Program;
- Working with other federal agencies to address research gaps, develop more new interventions, and facilitate more timely translation of known effective interventions through the CDC's DEBI pipeline;
- Encouraging public health partners to engage community leaders and increase HIV awareness;
- Developing new channels for communicating about the impact of HIV/AIDS on black families and communities;
- Publishing and distributing information that identifies social factors contributing to the HIV epidemic among African Americans;
- Working with faith leaders on ways to talk about HIV/AIDS and encourage behavior change;
- Developing prevention materials for the workplace;
- Continuing conversations with African American and public health partners about progress in reducing HIV transmission;
- Working with HHS agencies to scale up efforts to make HIV prevention, care, and treatment higher priorities for African American leaders;
- Calling for a national mobilization of African American and public health leaders to encourage people to be Aware, Communicate, and Test — ACT against HIV.
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