Now isn't time to cut prevention funding

By Joseph Interrante (right) in The Tennessean

No matter what the spin, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's poorly protected secret is bad news.

It has been widely reported that the official estimates for annual HIV infections in the U.S. will be raised in 2008, to 55,000-60,000 annual infections, a 35-50 percent increase over existing projections. Ironically, this news comes at the same time that UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, lowered its global estimate for people living with HIV/AIDS from 40 million to 33 million.

Whether the increase is the result of better methods for reporting and tracking or an actual increase in new infections is unknown. It is probably a result of both.

Also unclear are the reasons for the CDC's delay in officially releasing the new data until early to mid-2008. What is clear is that this delay almost certainly guarantees that the findings will not be available until after Congress considers
President Bush's budget. As proposed, 2009 HIV prevention funding will be cut $6 million at the very time that more, not fewer, resources are needed.

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