The Louisiana Commission on HIV/AIDS has released a 2003 report and recommendations to media in hopes that the upcoming gubernatorial candidates will recognize the need for sufficient funds and health care for HIV/AIDS.
David Munroe, commission chairman, said the purpose of the report is to raise education and awareness about the disease to Louisiana legislators and education and healthcare institutions.
“We want to focus more on prevention methods and keeping people from becoming infected in the first place,” Munroe said. “It’s more cost-effective to spend money on prevention before they get to that point when they need extensive care.”
He said the report is financed through the Department of Health and Hospitals, and the Louisiana Office of Public Health compiled the information.
Munroe said this issue is the sort of thing the commission hopes to see the gubernatorial candidates address.
The commission has tried to contact as many audiences as possible, honing in on legislators and public health officials, Munroe said.
Munroe said emphasis on getting the word out about HIV/AIDS comes at a time when health care budget cuts are inevitable, and the state’s HIV outpatient clinic at the Medical Center of Louisiana in New Orleans is in jeopardy of closing.
“The clinic sees as many as 3,400 patients a year,” Munroe said. “There are physicians there that concentrate 100 percent of their time on HIV-related issues, and general medicine clinics may not have the resources for that.”
DeAnn Gruber, commission vice chair, said the charity hospital almost closed two months ago when the first round of budget cuts occurred, but it remained open with community advocacy.
She said it is important to have the most current information on this topic right now because the state is going to be faced with budget cuts.
“The state of treatment and care in Louisiana needs to be identified,” Gruber said. “We are ranked as being one of the highest populations with HIV/AIDS in the nation.”
She said among the state’s population with the virus, new trends indicate adolescents and young adults as the fastest-growing infected age group.
“In our report, we’ve made recommendations to the Department of Education,” Gruber said. “Across the state, colleges have tried to do peer education on this, but as a commission we haven’t taken a strong stand. We’re trying to work with the Department of Education to make this information available to all ages.”
One way the commission plans to help prevention efforts in schools is by supporting a condom distribution program, Munroe said.
The study said in 2001, persons 20 to 29 years of age had the highest rate of newly detected cases in the Houma region.
According to the report, there are persons living with HIV/AIDS in all 64 Louisiana parishes, the number of AIDS cases increased in 2001 for the first time since the introduction of new drug therapies in 1996 and since then, the number of deaths among persons with AIDS has decreased dramatically. It also notes that data from 2000-2001 indicates a leveling or reversal of the decline in deaths.
“The New Orleans region has the largest number of persons living with HIV/AIDS [with] 6,094 persons living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 2001,” the report said. “Baton Rouge ranked seventh highest in AIDS case rates in 2001 among large metropolitan areas in the United States.”
The study separated Louisiana into nine regions, including New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Houma, Lafayette, Lake Charles, Alexandria, Shreveport, Monroe and Hammond/Slidell regions.