By Deborah Gilbert
News and Information Services
Kristine Gebbie, the Clinton administration’s national AIDS policy coordinator, encountered courteous but passionate desperation among listeners who attended her talk on federal AIDS policy last Thursday night. Gebbie was on campus for events related to World AIDS Day. Her talk was sponsored by the Public Health Student Association.
Speaking to some 50 people in Hutchins Hall, Gebbie noted that at least one million people in the United States are now infected with HIV or AIDS, and stressed that the Clinton administration has increased funding for AIDS research and has built AIDS into its health care reform proposal. About 10 percent of the budget for the National Institutes of Health is earmarked for AIDS research, she added.
She also cited the new Drug Development Task Force, announced last week in Washington, D.C., that will combine the forces of academics, pharmaceutical companies, government regulators and AIDS advocacy groups. The fact that 15 pharmaceutical companies will now share their drug research with each other should “speed up the research process,” she said.
Health reform also should beef up state and local health departments, she added, so they don’t have to choose between immunizing children and treating tuberculosis or helping AIDS patients. Gebbie also advocated providing sterile needles to drug users, safer sex programs in schools, and research on how to empower “receptive partners, male and female” so they will demand that condoms be used.
In the past, “the Centers for Disease Control had rigid and restrictive guidelines about what could be said in sex education programs,” she added, “but in January, we will begin stressing community control so that local groups can determine what must be said to whom” to be effective.
She also noted that after World AIDS Day hoopla is over, the key is to “find a way to not let AIDS fall from our consciousness. That is my job.”
Noting that “we are in a state of emergency right now. We don’t really have time to wait for community dialog,” one audience member asked “How can you speed things along?”
Gebbie said this can be done at the grassroots level by “convincing local groups that they can claim the moral and ethical high ground by demanding effective AIDS education, and by encouraging police chiefs to get involved in syringe exchanges for drug abusers.
“I am willing,” Gebbie added, “to wait for several months to get successful programs underway rather than just have a flash in the pan that dies out.”
Responding to a comment that Clinton needs to reaffirm his commitment to AIDS programs, Gebbie said: “I could stand on the White House lawn and pass out condoms and sterile syringes but that wouldn’t have any impact at the community level. What I have to do is get the biggest local businessman and biggest churchman to sit down with conservative groups and say, ‘These changes have to happen.’”
