On September 18th, ABC's "20/20" program aired a piece on five Texas women who slept with "HIV criminal" 53-year-old Philippe Padieu, convicted and sentenced to five concurrent 45-year sentences for infecting these women with HIV after failing to disclose his HIV status and having unprotected sex with them. I anticipated yet another sensationalized "expose'" pitting one or more unaware female victims against the evil person with HIV, narrated by a stunningly uninformed member of the media. Sad to say, I mostly got what I expected.

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Nearly three decades after the identification of the first cases of AIDS, our national dialogue continues to fail those living with HIV by failing to put human rights at the center of AIDS prevention and treatment.

Stigma, discrimination, poverty, homophobia, racism, sexism, and misinformation continue to fuel the spread of HIV and hurt those living with it in very real ways. These terms routinely are recited in our collective litanies of what needs to be addressed, but far less frequently made concrete and specific in policy plans and prevention strategies. As a community, we need to consistently insist that government officials commit to a long-term response to HIV that treats human rights as a central theme rather than an isolated issue that can be bargained away when politics get in the way. Until all approaches -- whether legal, medical, or political -- are grounded in respect for the dignity of those individuals they purport to help, they will fail those individuals.

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One of the highlighted events during the national AIDS prevention conference in Atlanta this week is the town hall meeting scheduled for this evening, Tuesday, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. Jeff Crowley, Director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP), will hear from conference attendees and others on their views of the development of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy (NHAS). This and a dozen other town hall meetings scheduled all across the country have been planned to "engage the public in meaningful ways," as the White House website puts it, in the development of a long-overdue national strategy to address the U.S. domestic HIV epidemic. ONAP also plans to get input from a soon-to-be-reconstituted President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA), and from input posted on a new page for that purpose appearing on www.whitehouse.gov.

Efforts are underway to help people make their comments at these town hall meetings as useful as possible. Starting with the Atlanta town hall, advocates in 13 different locations will have about 90 minutes (assuming things start and end on time, and minus introductions and wrap-up) to tell Crowley their views. This is a start towards making a reality out of manifestos such as the Denver Principles, which call for inclusion of people with HIV in every level of decision-making in the policies and organizations affecting their lives. But is this step enough? Is this opportunity for input sufficiently meaningful?

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