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I’m Dr. Howard Koh, Assistant Secretary for Health
for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
and I’m delighted to welcome you again
to the 19th International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC,
the largest AIDS conference in the world.
Today, I’m thrilled to have my friend and colleague,
Dr. Kevin Fenton, here. Dr. Fenton is a universally respected
global leader in public health and he has a very important role
at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
as the Director of the National Center for ***/AIDS,
Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention.
Welcome, Kevin.
Thank you. Great to be here.
Kevin, you have given many important presentations
at this conference. One of them is about the key theme
of High-Impact Prevention.
Can you tell us exactly what that means?
Sure. Well, the National ***/AIDS Strategy really sets a vision
for change for *** in the United States in which
we are going to be focused on reducing incidence
and improving quality to care as well as reducing health disparities.
The High-Impact approach is CDC’s strategy
for implementing the National ***/AIDS Strategy.
By looking at the prevention tool kit which now fantastically
developed with new biomedical, behavioral, and structural approaches,
but also says how do we select the right interventions
for the right populations, implement them with quality
and impact to make a real difference
with the ***/AIDS epidemic here at home.
Sounds great. Tell us more about what Federal grantees
and Federal staff should know about High-Impact Prevention.
Well, first of all I think our grantees must be excited
that we are now having a very clear approach
to implementation and holding ourselves accountable
for selecting interventions, for looking at the effectiveness
and the cost effectiveness of interventions,
for having new conversations about coverage,
scale and impact.
It means that local grantees can begin a discussion
on prioritization of their interventions.
Then finally the High-Impact Prevention brings new tools
to monitoring and holding accountable each other
of what were are doing and hoping to achieve at the local level.
You had another presentation on the black *** epidemic.
Please tell us a couple take away points on that.
That’s right. As you know there are communities
in the United States which are disproportionately affected by ***
-- gay and bisexual men of all races, Latinos and Hispanics
and of course African-Americans.
And we know that African-Americans account for about
30 % percent of the U.S. population, but are nearly half
of all new infections which are occurring.
This disparity is severe for both men and for women.
It isn’t the color of our skin as a community that puts us at risk.
Often it is the social and structural realities of which
we are living: poverty, poor access to health care services,
poor educational and employment opportunities.
So as we are thinking about addressing the epidemic
we have to think about both individual approaches
as well as integrating those social and structural interventions.
That’s what this conference has been about.
So exciting. Tell us your vision, Kevin, of what
this means for the future of the epidemic.
Ultimately, we are looking at further driving down *** incidence
in the United States and really tackling the tremendous problem
we have in the US with health inequities.
Too many persons of color, too many gay and bisexual men
in the United States are disproportionately affected by this epidemic.
We can and we must do better.
Kevin, thanks so much. That is very, very powerful.
Thanks for all that you are doing for us.
Thank you so much.
So, I am Dr. Howard Koh from the
International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC.