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Page 2 The Skanner May 10, 2017 Challenging People to Shape a Better Future Now Bernie Foster Founder/Publisher Bobbie Dore Foster Executive Editor Jerry Foster Advertising Manager Christen McCurdy News Editor Patricia Irvin Graphic Designer Melanie Sevcenko Reporter Monica J. Foster Seattle Office Coordinator Susan Fried Photographer 2016 MERIT AWARD WINNER The Skanner Newspaper, es- tablished in October 1975, is a weekly publication, published every Wednesday by IMM Publi- cations Inc. 415 N. Killingsworth St. P.O. Box 5455 Portland, OR 97228 Telephone (503) 285-5555 Fax: (503) 285-2900 info@theskanner.com www.TheSkanner.com The Skanner is a member of the National Newspaper Pub lishers Association and West Coast Black Pub lishers Association. All photos submitted become the property of The Skanner. We are not re spon sible for lost or damaged photos either solicited or unsolicited. ©2017 The Skanner. All rights re served. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission prohibited. Opinion Stay True to the National HIV/AIDS Strategy By Judith Auerbach, Rob- ert Bank, Chris Collins, JD Davids, Rebecca Haag, David Ernesto Munar, Dana van Gorder, Phill Wilson and A. Toni Young (Original Conve- ners of Coalition for a Nation- al AIDS Strategy) T en years ago, hundreds of organizations and individuals signed a pe- tition calling on all pres- idential candidates to create a national AIDS strategy. We knew the approach to HIV in the U.S. had to change. If you read about AIDS in the pa- per, then it was likely about the horrifying scale of the global epidemic; the epidem- ic at home had largely be- come invisible. The national HIV response we saw was a patchwork: uncoordinated, without clear goals, under- invested where the challenge was most acute, with inter- ventions delivered well below the scale necessary for im- pact. And the science of HIV prevention was changing dra- matically without sufficient efforts to put it into practice. By the end of 2007, most presidential candidates, in- cluding John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, had accepted the challenge to create a strategy. In June 2010, President Obama issued the first comprehensive Nation- al HIV/AIDS Strategy for the United States. Five Things We Learned From Implementation of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy 1) A commitment to being strategic provides political cover to do tough things. The Strategy itself was full of smart analysis of the epi- demic and laudable goals, but its real impact came in how it was used. With strong lead- ership by Jeff Crowley, head of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP), and his deputy Greg Millett, a series of epidemiologically necessary but politically chal- lenging policy innovations were undertaken, each justi- fied by the new Strategy. This included: • Increased investment in “ BE A PART OF THE CONVERSATION #SkNews 2) Changing the conversa- tion is important, and it’s just the first step. The Strategy helped put the domestic epidemic back on the radar and galvanized the AIDS services communi- ty around a new approach to tackling the epidemic focused on epidemiologic impact. Be- yond assuring the availability of services, the focus shifted to outcomes, and people asked how a policy would lead to ac- complishing the Strategy’s prevention and treatment House to own the Strategy because we wanted the gov- ernment to be responsible for follow-through. But it all started with the communi- ty. And that meant that AIDS service organizations were ready to engage creatively with the government when the nation embarked on a more outcomes-oriented ap- proach full of hard choices. As the Strategy said, “The job ... does not fall to the Federal Government alone. ... Success will require the commitment of all parts of society[.]” targets. Conversely, observ- ing that an approach would fail to advance the Strategy’s goals was now a tool to fight bad policy. Using the “care continuum” as a framework for assessing service deliv- ery helped bring focus to the Strategy goal of greater equi- ty. All of these were advanc- es, but they only took us so far. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) -- which led to a marked increase in Medicaid cover- age among people living with HIV -- as well as increased investments in appropriate services expanded access to lifesaving and infection-pre- venting measures. 4) It takes amazing science and the commitment to de- liver its results to everyone. The outcomes of HIV/AIDS research have been phenom- enal, turning a deadly disease into a chronic, manageable condition in the space of a couple decades. When we were working on the strat- egy effort, we had inklings of the potential efficacy of “treatment as prevention” and pre-exposure prophy- laxis (PrEP) to prevent both transmission and acquisition of HIV. When rigorous, multi-site clinical trials proved these ap- proaches did work, it changed what was considered possi- ble, and scientific and policy leaders in the U.S. and around the world now said we had the opportunity to “end AIDS.” Soon, in places such as New York and San Francisco, ac- tivists, scientists and officials took up the challenge. 3) It matters that the effort grew from the community. We wanted the White Read the rest of this commentary at TheSkanner.com The science of HIV prevention was changing dramatically with- out sufficient efforts to put it into practice HIV prevention for gay men, which had been seri- ously under-financed rel- ative to that population’s share of the epidemic. • A new, “high impact” ap- proach to HIV preven- tion emphasizing evi- dence-based programming at scale. • Reallocation of funds to ar- eas of the country most af- fected by HIV. • Streamlining of data re- porting to track progress more effectively. A new emphasis was placed on federal agency coordina- tion that has shown some suc- cess and remains a work in progress, as well on the most affected communities, which are now at the leading edge of Climate Change Is Creating Climate Refugees H Local News Pacific NW News World News Opinions Jobs, Bids Entertainment Community Calendar RSS feeds progress in the U.S. response. ave you ever heard of the Marshall Islands? They are 1156 islands that constitute a repub- lic in the South Pacific. Major battles during World War II were contested on those is- lands and, following the war, nuclear tests were conduct- ed on there, too, from which there was significant radio- active fallout. The capital city is only three feet above sea level. I have never been to the Marshall Islands, but during the People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., on April 29, I met and interviewed a woman from that republic. She is a student in the United States. She and I spoke on the air (WPFW-FM, part of the Pacifica Network) about what the climate crisis means for her people. Climate change has a di- rect impact on the future of the Marshall Islands. At three feet above sea level, the Marshall Islands do not have much room to maneuver. With extreme environmental Bill Fletcher Jr. The Global African changes, particularly with damaging storms, the islands have faced severe floods. She described roads cut off as a result of high water and the inability of the people to leave their homes. “ what they needed to do to sur- vive. And one route to sur- vival will inevitably be migra- tion unless there is some sort of creative infrastructure work that can preserve life in the Marshall Islands. And it is this matter of cli- mate migration that is rare- ly discussed in mainstream circles. Certainly, the envi- ronmental movement is ad- dressing it, but in the 2016 U.S. elections, for instance, in all of the xenophobic discus- sions concerning immigra- There is a global necessity to ad- dress the future of islands that may become submerged My co-anchor — he great sportswriter Dave Zirin — and I asked, almost at the same time, what did she think would happen as sea levels rose? What would the people do? In some respects, our ques- tion may have seemed odd or simplistic. The people of the Marshall Islands would do tion, there was no discussion about the fact that island na- tions across the planet will be disappearing and that their populations will need to mi- grate somewhere. The woman from the Mar- shall Islands that Dave and I interviewed wants to return to her home. She is trying to be optimistic about the future of that island republic, but she was clearly frightened by the possibility that those islands and their history will disap- pear beneath the ocean waves forever. The debate concerning the environment and the debates around immigration must be joined together. There is a global necessity to address the future of islands that may become submerged. Many of these islands were once—or continue to be—possessions/ colonies of Europe, Japan and/ or the United States. In that sense, there is a historic ob- ligation that is owed to these islanders by the so-called “Global North.” The Global North left many of these terri- tories “underdeveloped”—to borrow a phrase from the late Walter Rodney—and now the bill has come due. That means that, in addition to assisting in preventive measures, and in addition to addressing cli- mate change, immigration policies must be changed, so that space is created for these climate refugees.
