Do you believe that people living with HIV were engaged in a meaningful way to influence the national Ending the HIV Epidemic plan? That’s a question that HIV researchers at the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care (IAPAC) hope to answer. But they need your input. To that end, they’ve set up an online survey for folks living with HIV and located in areas affected by the HIV initiative.

The survey is free and takes about 15 minutes. You can access the IAPAC survey here.

“The main purpose of this study,” the researchers write, “is to learn how much influence people living with HIV believe they have in decisions regarding government initiatives. The research will also look at how those perceptions differ by race, gender and age.”

The introductory page includes further information about the survey, including details about privacy: “The researchers will keep information about you in a secure location with limited access,” according to the survey. “If the results of this study are made public, information that identifies you will not be collected or used. The researchers will not use or share your identifiable information collected for this research study for any future research studies, even after your identifiers are removed.”

The HIV plan referenced in the survey is the federal initiative “Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America,” which was launched in 2019 and is sometimes referred to as the EHE initiative. The HIV plan aims to lower new HIV rates 75% by 2025 and 90% by 2030. This would amount to fewer than 3,000 HIV cases a year.

Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America

Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for AmericaCourtesy of HIV.GOV

The plan focuses federal resources on 57 key jurisdictions, pictured in the map above (the juristidictions are spelled out on the survey). They include seven states that have a high HIV burden in rural areas—Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma and South Carolina—along with 48 counties plus Washington, DC, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, that make up more than half of new HIV diagnoses in the nation.

To learn more about “Ending the HIV Epidemic,” read an overview at HIV.gov and visit the official webpage at HRSA.org. And for related articles in POZ, click #Ending the Epidemic.

This is not to be confused with the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS), which was originally launched in 2010 and updated on last year’s World AIDS Day, December 1, to cover 2021 to 2015. Similar to the End the HIV Epidemic plan, the HIV strategy aims to reduce new HIV cases by 75% by 2025 and by 90% by 2030. But it offers a nationwide roadmap that includes goals such as reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes for people living with HIV. To learn more, see “What’s New in the Updated National HIV/AIDS Strategy?”

 

You may be familiar with IAPAC for its leadership in the Fast-Track Cities initiative—you can watch at documentary about it above. The initiative aims to end urban HIV epidemics by 2030 and encourages cities across the globe to accelerate their fight against HIV, tuberculosis and viral hepatitis. The effort has aimed for the 90-90-90 targets set by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). Those targets include:

  • Getting 90% of people living with HIV to know their status

  • Getting 90% of people diagnosed with HIV in care and on meds

  • Getting 90% of people diagnosed with HIV and on meds to achieve an undetectable viral load.

The Fast-Track Cities initiative is also hosting a National Dialogue on the Intersection of Racism and HIV as a Public Health Crisis, which includes a series of online sessions, each hosted in one of 12 U.S. Fast Track Cities. The debut event took place earlier this month in Chicago in partnership with Howard Brown Health. You can read more about the dialogue events and Fast-Track Cities on IAPAC.org.