Mayor Adrian Fenty has not marshaled every resource in his administration, the community or the schools to tackle the District’s staggering HIV/AIDS epidemic despite making some strides against the disease, a new study finds.
The annual report card from the D.C. Appleseed Center for Law and Justice gives the District high marks for rapid testing, interagency coordination, surveillance and fighting the disease in the D.C. Jail. But Fenty’s leadership on HIV is lacking, Appleseed found, needle-exchange programs still fall short and the D.C. public and charter schools fall far behind.
The District’s HIV rate is about 3 percent, according to the city’s HIV/AIDS Administration. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consider an epidemic “severe” when the percentage among residents exceeds 1 percent.
» Leadership: B+
» HIV surveillance: A
» HIV testing: A
» Youth initiatives: B
» Monitoring and evaluation: B-
» Public education: C+
» Needle exchange: B+
If the city’s primary goal is to prevent new infections, “We’re not there yet,” said Walter Smith, Appleseed’s executive director. The solution is long-term, he said, and “straight A’s for a sustained period of time.”
“You have to, because the consequence of not doing that is so grave,” Smith said.
The fifth Appleseed report finds that the HIV/AIDS Administration, led by Dr. Shannon Hader, has markedly improved “from an era of management turmoil.” Under Hader’s direction, the administration has started and expanded several key initiatives designed to prevent infection and reduce high-risk behavior, Appleseed reports.
That said, Fenty’s “public appearances and statements about the epidemic have fallen short of his enthusiasm for action inside the government,” according to the report. For example, three days after the release of the city’s startling 2008 HIV/AIDS epidemiology update, Fenty failed to acknowledge the disease during his State of the District address.
Fenty’s public relations strategy “is not sufficient to keep a consistent, continuous focus on what the whole community can do to combat the epidemic,” the report states. Without a strong social marketing campaign, the message that HIV/AIDS is totally preventable “is clearly not getting through.”
D.C. Public Schools and the public charter schools garnered Appleseed’s lowest mark, a C+. The prevention curriculum “is not prevailing the way it ought to be,” Smith said, as more than one in 10 students has been infected with a sexually transmitted disease.
“We need to not only teach them reading, writing, arithmetic, we need to teach them how to protect themselves,” Smith said. “And we’re not doing the job there that needs to be done.”
Fenty declined comment until a press conference Wednesday to unveil the report.
