WASHINGTON, July 12 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama released a domestic AIDS strategy on Monday that aims to cut the infection rate by 25 percent, test 90 percent of those infected and get 85 percent of patients treated right away.
The new plan, to be formally released on Tuesday, also has modest aims to get 20 percent more of the most at-risk groups such as gay and bisexual men and blacks treated with drugs to control their infections.
“Unless we take bold actions, we face a new era of rising infections, greater challenges in serving people living with HIV, and higher health care costs,” the report reads.
The United States should be able to lower the annual number of new infections by 25 percent from 56,300 to 42,225 a year by 2015, the plan said.
It also proposes to cut the HIV transmission rate by 30 percent. Currently, 5 percent of HIV patients infect someone else and the plan aims to lower this to 3.5 percent.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 79 percent of people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS know they have it. The plan aims to increase this to 90 percent.
To this end, the plan calls for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make a top priority the review of new HIV diagnostic tests.
It also promises to get 85 percent of newly diagnosed patients into a doctor’s office or clinic within three months. Currently, 65 percent get treated that quickly.
The plan also targets behavior. “Congress and State legislatures should consider the implementation of laws that promote public health practice and underscore the existing best evidence in HIV prevention for sexual minorities,” it reads.
More than 1.1 million people in the United States are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While only about 5 percent of patients infect someone else, this is enough to keep levels of the virus stable in the United States, the CDC says. The fatal and incurable virus is spread during sex, in blood and breast milk and by contaminated needles.
The U.S. government has a program to fight AIDS globally — PEPFAR, or President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — but there has not been a similar coherent domestic strategy.
While the administration of former President George W. Bush was praised for coming up with PEPFAR, it was widely criticized for promoting abstinence-only education in place of more comprehensive programs stressing condom use.
The new Obama plan includes abstinence but also stresses other approaches.
“We must also move away from thinking that one approach to HIV prevention will work, whether it is condoms, pills, or information,” the plan reads.
“Instead, we need to develop, evaluate, and implement effective prevention strategies and combinations of approaches including efforts such as expanded HIV testing (since people who know their status are less likely to transmit HIV), education and support to encourage people to reduce risky behaviors (and) the strategic use of medications and biomedical interventions,” it adds.
Some AIDS activist groups began criticizing the policy even before it was released, saying it did not come close to doing what they had hoped.
The AIDS virus infects 33 million people globally and has killed 25 million since the pandemic began in the 1980s.
In Africa, most new AIDS patients are women infected by men during sex. In the United States HIV disproportionately affects men who have sex with men, blacks and Hispanics.
(Editing by Eric Beech)
U.S. govt slams BP for missed deadlines on spill
The U.S. government threatened on Sunday to remove BP from efforts to seal a blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico if it doesn’t do enough to stop the leak, though it acknowledged only the company and the oil industry have the needed know-how.
The Coast Guard said that over 65 miles (110 kms) of Gulf Coast has experienced “shoreline impact” from the spill and less than half of it could be cleaned up relatively quickly, underscoring the growing ecological toll of the disaster.
U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Washington is frustrated and angry that BP Plc missed “deadline after deadline” in its efforts to seal the well more than a month after an oil rig explosion triggered the disaster.
“I am angry and I am frustrated that BP has been unable to stop this oil from leaking and to stop the pollution from spreading. We are 33 days into this effort and deadline after deadline has been missed,” Salazar said after visiting BP’s U.S. headquarters in Houston on Sunday.
“If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately,” he told reporters as the administration maintained its hard line.
Salazar’s strong comments followed President Barack Obama’s on Saturday, when he blamed the spill on “a breakdown of responsibility” at BP. The unfolding disaster has become a top priority on Obama’s crowded domestic agenda.
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The chief of the Coast Guard, Admiral Thad Allen, acknowledged on Sunday that the government is forced to rely on BP and the private oil sector to try to plug the gusher. At the same time, BP said the containment method it was attempting on the ocean floor was capturing much less oil than before.
Company engineers were readying other short-term solutions, the next one expected to start late on Tuesday. But BP Managing Director Bob Dudley said there was “no certainty” of success at the unprecedented depths at which they were being tried — one mile (1.6 km) down in the Gulf of Mexico.
More than a month after a rig explosion triggered what Obama has described as an environmental disaster and “BP’s mess,” oil is still spewing virtually unchecked from BP’s ruptured Macondo seabed well.
JINDAL FRUSTRATED
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal blasted both BP and federal authorities for not acting fast enough to avert the disaster.
The Coast Guard and BP were slow to make decisions and delayed supplying necessary clean-up equipment even as oil washed onto the state’s fragile marshland, Jindal said.
“It is clear the resources needed to protect our coast are still not here: boom, skimmers, vacuums, jack-up barges are all in short supply,” Jindal told a news conference in Venice.
“Oil sits and waits for clean-up and every day that it waits for clean-up more and more marsh dies,” he said.
Jindal said he was “frustrated” by the slow pace and said the delays were “unacceptable.”
At a time of mounting U.S. government and public criticism of the company and its executives over the catastrophic spill, Allen said he trusted BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who has made comments downplaying its size and environmental impact.
Given the lack of a solution so far and the doubts over BP, Allen was asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” why the U.S. government did not completely take over the spill containment operation from the London-based firm.
“What makes this an unprecedented anomalous event is access to the discharge site is controlled by the technology that was used for the drilling, which is owned by the private sector,” Allen said. “They have the eyes and ears that are down there. They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved,” he added.
Asked too about the apparent growing U.S. lack of confidence in Hayward, Allen said: “I trust Tony Hayward. When I talk to him, I get an answer.”
SIPHON LESS EFFECTIVE
BP has deployed a long suction tube down to the larger of two leaks from the well, but a BP spokesman said on Sunday this captured only 1,360 barrels per day of oil over the 24 hours to midnight Saturday. The flow has been declining from the 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 litres) per day the company had said the tube was siphoning off three days ago.
Estimates of the amount of oil leaking from the well vary widely, from 5,000 barrels per day to as much as 70,000 bpd.
BP engineers are now preparing a “top kill,” pumping heavy fluids into the well to try to shut it off, an operation to begin late Tuesday or early Wednesday, Dudley told CNN.
Many scientists believe the Gulf spill has already eclipsed the 11 million gallons (41 million litres) spilled by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska. They warn the spreading oil could be caught in a powerful ocean current that could take it to the Florida Keys, Cuba and the U.S. East Coast.
Coast Guard Admiral Mary Landry said 65.6 miles (106 km) of shoreline has been impacted so far and about 30 acres (12 hectares) of marshland.
She told a briefing that of the area affected on the coast “25 miles … are really readily cleanable and the others are a little harder access but we’ll get to it.”
Of the impacted marshland about half of it has heavily oiled she said the rest “lightly oiled with sheen.”
BP and the Environmental Protection Agency were meeting on Sunday night to discuss the dispersants BP is deploying to help contain the spill amid concerns among some environmentalists about their toxicity, an EPA spokesman said.
Churchgoers in Louisiana coastal parishes affected by the spill prayed for God’s help. “You (God) can clear that oil up, because that oil was down there thousands of years before it came up in the Gulf. So you know what to do with it, dear God,” retired oyster fisherman Herbert Guidry prayed in the New Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church in Houma.
Analysts say growing ecological and economic damage from the spill could become a political liability for Obama before November congressional elections.
BP stocks have taken a beating in the markets in the month since the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers and touched off the spill. Its share price shed another 4 percent on Friday in London, extending recent sharp losses.
(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey and Jackie Frank in Washington, Sharon Reich in Louisiana, Hashem Kalantari in Tehran; Writing by Ed Stoddard and Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Eric Beech)