President Barack Obama and HIV/AIDS
Advising Obama
What would be the three things you would counsel President Barack Obama, to change immediately that would make a difference in HIV prevention and treatment in the United States?
Sandy Thurman
Faculty, Rollins School of Public Health, Atlanta, Ga.
Former "AIDS Czar" Under Former U.S. President Bill Clinton
First of all, I don't know how much difference this will actually make in HIV prevention and treatment, but I would ask President-elect Obama to get the Secretary of Health and Human Services to sign the waiver that allows people with HIV/AIDS to come into the United States and out of the United States freely, so we can finally have an international AIDS conference in the United States after all these years.
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Secondly, I would advise President-elect Barack Obama to focus on the domestic epidemic again and focus on prevention . We're losing so much ground and we really need to focus on prevention and hardest-hit communities. I think that's very, very important.
The other thing would be to look at increasing the work that we're doing overseas, but in addition to providing drugs to people living with HIV, to focus again on prevention. We can't treat our way out of this disease.
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