$45 million public awareness campaign on HIV/AIDS epidemic in U.S.

Apr 8 2009

The U.S. government has announced a $45 million program to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The five-year program will initially target those populations most at risk - black American men and women and gay and bisexual men and will include efforts to get the media and entertainment industries to carry safer-sex and prevention messages.

Experts believe that many Americans have forgotten about AIDS and have in fact become complacent and the new campaign is as much about combating this complacency as combating the disease itself.

An advertisement in the new campaign which will run online in English and Spanish called "Act Against AIDS," points out that every nine and a half minutes in the United States, someone is infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

The campaign is the joint effort on the part of federal public health agencies and private organizations, including 14 African American civic groups.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) blacks are 12.5% of the U.S. population but account for half of all new HIV infections.

The AIDS awareness campaign comes at an opportune moment as polls by the Kaiser Family Foundation show that only 14% of Americans say they have seen, heard, or read about HIV in the last 12 months.

Critics say the $45 million dollar communications plan, however good the intentions, will do little to help identify those 300,000 infected individuals who may unknowingly be infecting others and the government would do better to spend $200 million in getting more people tested for HIV.

The Act Against AIDS campaign includes a website, nineandahalfminutes.org, where information on protection against HIV transmission can be accessed.

According to the CDC 56,000 Americans become newly infected with HIV each year and more than 14,000 people die of it and 1.1 million people are currently infected - globally, 33 million are infected and 25 million have died.

There is no cure for HIV - it is transmitted sexually, in blood and in breast milk and while a cocktail of drugs can keep patients healthy, treatment is expensive and often the virus mutates and older drugs no longer affect it.