$1.7 million added to SF campaign to eradicate AIDS, HIV

James Loduca, San Francisco AIDS Foundation vice president, pauses while speaking at a news conference to announce additional funds toward the “get to zero” HIV/AIDS initiative at City Hall in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, October 29, 2015.

The Getting to Zero initiative started in San Francisco in 2014, and focuses among other things on providing access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) – an HIV-prevention drug regimen.

At the height of the epidemic, there were 130,000 new cases a year in the country and many of those people were dying. Mayor Lee and Superintendent Richard Carranza announced new strategies to achieve these goals: jointly finance at least one new development in the City for educator housing, develop a rental subsidy program for teachers, renew the Teacher Next Door program that provides down payment assistance to purchase homes in the City, and fund Housing Navigators-counselors to connect teachers with resources available to them through these new programs, existing Below Market Rate programs, and eviction prevention services.

According to Dr. Diane Havlir, the chief of the UCSF Division of HIV/AIDS at the San Francisco General Hospital, fighting HIV and AIDS in San Francisco has come a long way, but there remains much work to be done. Ten percent of people living with HIV in San Francisco are homeless. He also said that this money will be aimed at targeting people who are hard to reach.

More accurate reporting of HIV-related deaths is essential to monitor the progress of the fight against AIDS in South Africa, Dr. Bradshaw and colleagues emphasize. Those who have fallen to AIDS total 20,196 in San Francisco. Additionally, 16 states received Emerging Community grants based on the number of AIDS cases over the most recent five-year period. “I liken it to me telling my patients that I’m not going to give them a cholesterol-lowering drug because they might eat more ice cream”, Buchbinder quipped.

San Francisco’s Getting to Zero initiative is a multi-sector independent consortium operating under the principles of collective impact. The second hopes to expand the use of the controversial anti-HIV pill Truvada, which had recently been shown to reduce sexually transmitted diseases in men who had taken the pill, and believed to be “over 90 percent effective in preventing new infections” if taken daily. For more information, go to: gettingtozerosf.org. But it also reflects disparities in funding for the two global killers. MAF is a pioneer in HIV/AIDS funding, providing financial support to organizations working with underserved regions and populations.