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White House AIDS Policy Encourages Social Networking With Limited Budget

by Matthew Zuras on July 13, 2010 at 05:05 PM

federal aids funding
The White House just released its National HIV/AIDS strategy yesterday, and it ambitiously aims to reduce new HIV infections by 25-percent by 2015. How will it accomplish this goal? The plan outlines the use of more social networking, but not much new funding.

According to the new policy, "The United States currently provides more than $19 billion in annual funding for domestic HIV prevention, care and research, and there are constraints on the magnitude of any potential new investments in the Federal budget." President Obama's plan calls for restructuring rather than new funding, saying that governments on all levels should "refocus [...] existing efforts and deliver better results to the American people within current funding levels, as well as [...] highlight the need for additional investments."

Among other aspects of the plan, the policy calls for "evidence-based social marketing and education campaigns" to inform the public on how HIV is transmitted. Minority groups, men who have sex with men (MSMs) and intravenous drug users still lead the highest infected populations, and up to 21-percent of infected people may not even be aware of their condition. Obama's plan aims to get that number down to 10-percent, and specifically target groups more prone to infection. Currently, over 1.1 million people live with HIV in the United States, and 56,000 new people are infected each year.

The question, of course, is how the existing budget will be transformed to boost social networking campaigns. The report warns that "this is not a budget document" and provides few specifics on how money should be re-allocated. It suggests that funding should be distributed better among areas with the highest need, based on current rather than historic epidemiological data. The policy also asks state and local bodies to ultimately decide the "trade-offs" necessary to implement the plan, as "priority setting and resource allocation is best done as close to ground as possible." [From: Reuters and WhiteHouse.gov]

Tags: aids, Barack Obama, BarackObama, budget, health, hiv, national hivaids strategy, NationalHivaidsStrategy, social networking, SocialNetworking, top, white house, WhiteHouse

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