“We have a moral imperative to do much more and do it much better.”
Following up on the call for a national AIDS strategy — John Edwards is the first Presidential candidate to unveil a comprehensive plan to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic at home and abroad.
Joe Sudbay over at AMERICAblog has a post today talking about the need for a focused plan to end the AIDS epidemic, and the National AIDS Strategy that’s trying to make that a reality.
We’re all hearing a lot about the 2008 presidential race already, and the National AIDS Strategy is working to focus the candidates on the need to seriously address the problem here at home. It’s called for every candidate to develop a results-oriented strategy to fight HIV/AIDS domestically.
On the table is not only the fact that an estimated half of the million-plus Americans living with HIV/AIDS are not in care, but the huge disparities in who’s affected by the disease: the disproportionately high impact the epidemic is having on people of color, women of color (as the site points out, in 2004, HIV/AIDS was the leading cause of death among black women ages 25 - 34; for more on the impact of HIV on all women, see this post), gay men and other groups that can easily be made invisible in politics.
AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts and hundreds of organizations and individuals have already signed on to send the message to the candidates that this should be a priority. Hopefully they’ll listen. We urge our supporters to sign on and to ask other organizations and your friends and family to sign as well.
Find out more at www.nationalaidsstrategy.org.
