U.S. Moves Toward a National AIDS Strategy...Finally

It's open season on the Obama administration, as the president gets pummeled for everything from mishandling health care to perceived wimpiness. But the White House deserves kudos for its reasoned, rational approach to developing a national HIV/AIDS strategy.

Though the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has long required recipient countries to craft their own holistic AIDS strategy, the United States has been loath to develop its own. The result: what the Coalition for a National AIDS Strategy calls a "fragmented and uncoordinated response" to the virus. In some cases, that's meant government dollars getting poured into programs that lack specific goals and any mechanisms at all for evaluating success.

Into that void steps Obama's Office of National AIDS Policy, which -- in coordination with other departments -- is tasked with creating a national strategy that encompasses three primary goals: 1). reducing HIV incidence; 2). increasing access to care and optimizing health outcomes; and 3). reducing HIV-related disparities.  ONAP's task -- and challenge -- is to make those ideals into realistic, concrete solutions that cut across local, state and federal initiatives.

That strategy won't be unveiled for months, but through a nationwide a series of public hearings, ONAP's made a real effort to involve communities across the country. Last week ONAP (along with the Office of Public Health and Science) outlined the response, and the messages they highlighted hit all the right notes: increase outreach and focus on overlooked populations, address ongoing stigma and discrimination and look at structural issues, like housing. (My only quibble was the lack of attention paid to injection-drug users, which echoes a point Te-Ping made here last week.)

There's still much work to be done, though. The community feedback will inform a new, broad-based federal interagency working group in their effort to draft a comprehensive, but realistic strategy. And I'm heartened by the fact that they seem to be working closely with the Coalition for a National AIDS Strategy, which has long been a voice of reason on this issue. Sure, the process may not be fast enough for everyone's liking, and the resulting strategy will definitely need some scrutiny. But ONAP and the administration are taking the right steps to create that plan. At least on the public health front, anyway, Obama and his administration deserve to be cut some slack.

Photo Credit: timkelley