The Trump Administration’s HIV Prevention Contradictions
HIV attacks the body’s immune system and without treatment, it can lead to AIDS. The virus is transmitted via contact with body fluids such as semen, blood, and other bodily discharges.
The new head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has expressed some doubts about those facts. Now the Trump administration is contemplating the elimination of the HIV prevention division that is a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to NBC News.
If the CDC is anything, it is supposed to be the chief agency that detects, controls, and eliminates infectious diseases. HIV is just such a communicable microbe. The CDC estimates 31,800 Americans were infected with it in 2022, the year in which the latest data are available. The CDC also estimates that “approximately 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV. About 13 percent of them don’t know it and need testing.”
Oddly, efforts to cut back on the CDC’s programs aimed at reducing HIV infections stand in contradiction to President Donald Trump’s own Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. (EHE) initiative that he announced during his 2019 State of the Union address. Trump’s original EHE goal was to end the HIV epidemic in the United States by 2030. The EHE initiative boosted preventative strategies including increased HIV testing and the promotion of effective new pre-exposure prophylaxis medications. Thanks in part to the EHE, the rate of HIV infections is down 19 percent since 2016.
The Trump administration’s ultimate plan
Article from Reason.com
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