Norton Uses World AIDS Day to Call for Sustained Campaign to Defeat HIV/AIDS

December 1, 2008

Washington, D.C. - On World AIDS Day today, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) said that District residents, "have work to do at home, because the evidence does not show that the ‘safe sex' and ‘testing' messages have taken hold sufficiently here." Norton, who devoted 2007 to a series of successful town hall meetings to raise consciousness and eliminate homophobia and feelings of shame, said that "a continuous full-throttle campaign, making much greater use of the media is necessary to sustain concern about HIV/AIDS, a disease we know how to prevent." She said the campaign should be addressed particularly to the Black community here and across the country where an epidemic has taken hold.

After a 10-year battle, last year Norton succeeded in removing a congressional ban that kept the District from using local funds for a needle exchange effort, the only large city denied such a program. The Congresswoman applauded Mayor Adrian M. Fenty for immediately funding a needle exchange program, and integrating it with healthcare services, once the ban was lifted, particularly because, "only the District's former unique ban on the needle exchange can account for the city's ranking as number one in the nation in HIV infection, well above similar cities, even nearby Baltimore."

However, injection drug use is only one factor in the spread of the disease here, she said, "The most worrisome statistic has been the number of cases that progress from HIV to full-blown AIDS within 12 months, the highest in the country," Norton said. "Too many residents are still not aware that they can keep from getting AIDS if they get the HIV virus, provided they get tested and take medication. They can go on with their lives, but delayed diagnosis greatly diminishes their chances."

Much more attention needs to be paid to women, Norton said, because they are particularly vulnerable to infection by men whom they do not realize are regular or infrequent drug users. D.C. has the largest number of new female HIV cases, a 76 percent increase over six years. However, Norton said, "The most regrettable and tragic incidence of the virus is the completely preventable spread of the virus from mother-to-child. No city of 600,000 should account for six percent of all infants in the U.S. who get HIV from their mother prenatally. This is one ‘cure' we do have even when the mother has HIV."

Norton said that to avoid the sporadic attention paid to the virus, with tragic results, the continuous use of media creatively, especially public health ads on television, will be necessary.