We’ve always lived in a homophobic country–it’s ironic how we’re in a panic because one community-African Americans-are experiencing a large uptick in AIDS cases when the gay community has been living with it all along and has been ignored.

Quite frankly, I’m not surprised by the statistics. The only time we’ll actually change anything is if it affacts a majority of white, straight, male Americans.

On One-in-Ten on Sunday (hardly a secret, but still not on their website, here http://wfnx.com/shows/oneinten/default.aspx), the MALE Center (AIDS Action’s in-house out-reach) finally announced the availability of Post Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP). This is a treatment, known for 27 years, which dramatically reduces the probability of contracting HIV/AIDS after a positive exposure. For nearly all those years it has been used among medical professionals – a small kit that includes a shot of a standard anti-viral, to be used within 72 hours of any contact with suspicious blood or bodily fluid.

PEP has also eliminated the prospect of children born with HIV/AIDS, of which there were not one in Massachusetts or New York in the past three years. This is a function of PEP, and not of abortion, and is a huge and thoroughly ignored story. Ignored by your story no less than by other mainstream media.

After a little more than 20 years of successful use, the Fenway Community Health Center finally completed a Clinical Trial on nPEP (non-professional Post Exposure Prophylaxis) last year. They reported (http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/gw/Cmd?GMBookmarkable%26loc=lhc) their findings that clinical professionals are not chemically different from others, and that, lo and behold, PEP works most of the time.

In other words, there IS a morning-after pill, although it’s neither a pill, nor does it need be in the morning, there are side-effects (minimal, for most treatments) and, in spite of one clinical trial, it remains unsure that it is 100% effective. But it surely is effective enough to change the transmission rate of the virus in a large population.

It is, in fact and documented, effective enough for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=eohhs2terminal&L=6&L0=Home&L1=Provider&L2=Guidelines+and+Resources&L3=Guidelines+for+Clinical+Treatment&L4=Diseases+%26+Conditions&L5=HIV%26%2347;AIDS&sid=Eeohhs2&b=terminalcontent&f=dph_aids_c_pep&csid=Eeohhs2) to make it available in 22 different centers, at no cost, with minimal admission standards. In still other words, we could end the epidemic in this state – and in Washington, DC, your reporter’s target – within a short period. That is what really should have been your story – for it is both remarkable and local. But you chose to talk about DC, instead.

Your report yesterday glossed over a number of OTHER critical variables. Talk about testing ignored the critical nature of the rapid-test (there are now five different tests that give reasonably reliable results within 20 minutes); and about self-testing, now available through places as diverse as CVS or Rite-Aide or by mail via the net; and about the disparity in information across racial and sex lines.

In fact, your report only confirmed how ignorance in communities of color continue a policy of passive genocide. Ignoring self-tests and PEP in Washington, DC, clearly contributes to their high rate of infection, and your report only confirmed that ignorance.

The report also did not mention the newer rapid-tests; tests that identify infections in the first few days after exposure! Given that such new cases are themselves far more infectious in their first weeks in a new host, such tests are critically important to stopping the epidemic – and your report talks, instead, about dropouts, homicides, poverty and VOTING! Ignorance – and continued ignorance after and during your own program – contributes more to this epidemic than any of those conditions.

Your report yesterday also ignored other critical findings in this state, the only state with universal health care and a key pilot for this Obama reform. This state’s numbers, for 2008, were just being reported two weeks ago. There are controversies about their reliability – the undercount is still (as it is in Washington) dramatic, and the Bush administration’s requirement to collect names has surely reduced the accuracy of any estimate. Yet there is surely a real drop. According to DPH a month ago, that reduction is nearly 300 new cases from 2007’s rate.

Your report discussed costs only tangentially, and remarkably inaccurately, in terms of transmission rather than lifetime costs. When a caller suggested that infected people might have a shorter career span, your reporter ignored the very real costs of SSI for which anyone is eligible as soon as diagnosed. Not only SSI, but also free health care from the date of that diagnosis: At an average of $200,000 to $600,000 per case, from diagnosis to death (Harvard AIDS Institute data), that represents between $100,000,000 and $300,000,000, surely much, much larger than this year’s $70,000,000 cut in the DPH budget! Yet neither DPH, the governor, nor the legislature considered these serious reductions in state liability in planning cuts and budgets.

Because this is the ONLY state that has a universal health care system, it is the ONLY jurisdiction where those savings actually accrue to a public or private interest. And because of those savings, and the popular ignorance about their financial impact, national universal health is in serious jeopardy.

Finally, and this is perhaps the most tender of subjects, your report ignored why public and private agencies have avoided discussion of preventive testing (test your date!, perhaps using a test you bought online like this one – http://www.htesting.info/), of PEP and of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (which is now in clinical trials, for pills before you go out, or if you might expect to be exposed in any other way), and of a variety of interventions which could loosen the grip of clinical providers on their control of cases. That might be excused for a morning program, but there never IS that discussion, and the medical and social conditions have changed profoundly, and permanently, since the early days of this epidemic.

This is not rocket science. It barely touches on the real science of HIV/AIDS, already the most researched disease in the history of man. It does, however, suggest that WBUR ought to conduct more aggressive due diligence before reporting such naivete and superficiality.

The song that you heard was “In the Waiting Line” by Zero 7 from their album “Simple Things”. It was also featured on the soundtrack for the movie “Garden State”. Thanks for listening.

(Off topic – does anyone know what that sort of slow, electronic music played going to breaks in the middle of the show is?)

If 1% is epidemic, PLEASE talk about the 7% rate for black men. Talk about the increasing rates for black women in particular and the effect on communities.

This is horrific.

Kudos to Amy for finally raising the incarceration issue.

Please also include child abandonment, child and partner abuse, psychological problems sucide, murder, even unemployment are also consequences of free wheeling sex

Black men being on the “down low” is often cited, but prison sex/rape is perhaps a more closeted issue. Men’s bodies in prison are not their own and it may play a substantial role in the spread of this deadly virus.

Could you please have your commentators discuss this?

The path we are on currently is not the best way to combat HIV/AIDS.

Most of our sexually active generation (by the way, I’m one of them) should have “seamless access” to :

1. Awareness Campaigns / Advertisements about HIV/AIDS
2. Condoms

Hope someone will initiate a process in the right direction.

God Bless America!