From Friday’s NY Times.
Eight states and Puerto Rico will no longer receive federal money for an advanced H.I.V. monitoring system that showed that the annual infection rate in the nation was 40 percent higher than previously estimated, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.
The change will lower the number of jurisdictions using the system to 25, from 34, just as health departments are struggling to react to the news, released earlier this month, that the spread of AIDS is far worse than they had thought.
The jurisdictions that lost financing were Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Puerto Rico.
Terry Butler, a spokeswoman for the National Center for H.I.V., S.T.D. and TB Prevention at the centers, said that the total money for the system — which is awarded to applicants on a competitive basis — would remain the same, but that the remaining 25 participating states and cities would receive more. Ms. Butler said those participants had the most reliable systems and could help the centers produce the best estimates.
The system uses a new test that distinguishes recent infections from old ones, helping epidemiologists track them in something much closer to real time than was previously possible.
Let’s put this into some perspective. As of Nov. 2007, TN ranked 8th, 9th, and 10th in the nation for syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea, respectively, while some TN’eans still believe that HIV/AIDs can be caught from a toilet seat. And, overall, the south (which includes Tennessee) has a disproportionate number of HIV/AIDs patients.
While I am saddened that TN will no longer have funding to accurately track HIV cases, I am not surprised in the least. It’s more head-in-the-sand actions I believe lead to this.
One more reason I experience southern states as in a different universe. Really do feel desparate about the wages of miseducation. Like that blog says, I Blame it on the Patriarchy.