'Shocking' program could carve $60 million out of HIV/AIDS prevention budget over next three years

[meegbear]

A little-known initiative added to the recently-renewed Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Act will divert $60 million from the Center for Disease Control’s HIV/AIDS prevention budget over the next three years into a fund for which no states actually qualify.

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Renewed by Congress last fall and signed into law by President Bush in December, the act supports a wide range of care and treatment services for those living with HIV/AIDS. But a provision inserted into the act’s budget by conservative Republican Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) could dramatically reduce funding for prevention programs.

Coburn’s HIV Early Diagnosis Grant initiative mandates that $30 million in CDC's HIV/AIDS prevention dollars be set aside annually to fund grants for states that meet a specific set of qualifications regarding HIV testing.

The problem, according to HIV/AIDS community advocates, is that no states currently qualify for the grant program. However, the CDC’s prevention budget will still lose that $30 million annually, whether any state qualifies and applies or not.

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Laura Hanen, Director of Government Relations for the National Association of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, said advocates had urged a compromise with Coburn and other government officials to allow any unused portion of the $30 million to return to the CDC’s prevention budget each year.

Instead, Senator Tom Coburn — a frequent critic of how the CDC has spent portions of its HIV prevention budget in the past and a former co-chair of George Bush’s President’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) — inserted language in the legislation requiring the money be stripped from the CDC’s HIV prevention programming dollars.

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http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Shocking_program_could_carve_60_million_0302.html

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I went over 4 paragraphs, but it's hard to sum it up with only 4.