Latinos have always had the highest share of recent HIV circumstances in this area, but testing data suggests that may be changing.
The number of Latinos recently testing positive for HIV dropped 46 % from 2022 to 2023, according to a , primary report , released in July by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
The lower may represent the first time in five years that Latinos have n’t contributed to the most recent cases, giving rise to a lingering belief that the city’s millions of dollars to address the disturbing gap are working. But outreach workers and health care providers say that operate still needs to be done to prevent, and to examine, for HIV, especially among new immigrants.
” I am very hopeful, but that does n’t mean that we’re going to let up in any way on our efforts”, said , Stephanie Cohen, who oversees the city’s HIV program.
Public heath experts speculated that the state’s most recent statement might be motivating, but that more information is required to determine whether San Francisco has addressed disparities in its HIV services. Essential health measures that the public health office declined to provide to KFF Health News include how numerous Latinos were tested or how many Latinos were exposed to the disease had also decreased. Testing costs are even below pre-pandemic levels, according to the area.
According to Lindsey Dawson, associate director of HIV Policy and director of LGBTQ Health Policy at KFF, a health data nonprofit that includes KFF Health News, “if there are fewer Hispanic being reached by testing work despite a have, that indicates a major problem addressing HIV.”
San Francisco, like the , rest of the country, suffers significant differences in treatment costs for Hispanic and people of color. According to outreach workers, new refugees are more prone to infectious diseases because they are unsure of their options for testing or have a difficult time navigating the medical system.
In 2022, Latinos represented 44 % of new HIV cases in San Francisco, even though they accounted for only 15 % of the population. White accounted for the most of new cases with a 36 % share, while Latinos accounted for the largest share of new cases last year, according to the new document.
Cohen acknowledged that a one-year reduction is insufficient to elicit a pattern, but she added that giving local governments targeted funding may have helped lower Latino HIV cases. In the slide, we’re anticipating a final review.
San Francisco has an ambitious goal to be the first city in the United States to eradicate HIV, and about half of its$ 44 million HIV/AIDS resources last month came from city treasury. Unlike most towns, most places primarily rely on federal funds to pay for HIV services. By comparison, New Orleans, which has similar HIV costs, kicked in just$ 22, 000 of its$ 13 million total HIV/AIDS funds, according to that state’s health ministry.
As part of an effort to address HIV disparities among LGBTQ+ areas and people of color, San Francisco last month gave$ 2.1 million to three organizations — Instituto Familiar de la Raza, Mission Neighborhood Health Center, and San Francisco AIDS Foundation — to boost mentoring, testing, and treatment among Latinos, according to the city’s 2023 resources.
At Instituto Familiar de la Raza, which administers the contract, the funding has helped pay for HIV testing, prevention, treatment, outreach events, counseling, and immigration legal services, said Claudia Cabrera-Lara, director of the HIV program at SÃ a la Vida. But ongoing funding is n’t guaranteed.
” We live with the anxiety of not knowing what is going to happen”, she said.
A$ 150, 000 project with the public health department’s Instituto Familiar de la Raza was put together to look at how Latinos are contracting HIV, who is most vulnerable, and what health gaps still exist. The results are expected in September.
” It could help us shape, pivot, and grow our programs in a way that makes them as effective as possible”, Cohen said.
The center of the HIV epidemic in the mid-1980s, San Francisco set a , national model , for response to the disease after building a network of HIV services for residents to get free or low-cost HIV testing, as well as treatment, regardless of health insurance or immigration status.
Outreach workers are seeing the opposite of what outreach data from city testing showed: that new cases among Latinos decreased last year. They claim that as a result of their struggles to spread information about testing and prevention, such as taking preventive medications like PrEP, especially among the young and gay immigrant communities, they are encountering more Latinos who have been diagnosed with HIV.
San Francisco ‘s , 2022 epidemiological data , shows that 95 of the 213 people diagnosed at an advanced stage of the virus were foreign-born. Additionally, Latino men had a diagnosis rate that was 1.2 times higher than white men’s, and four times as high as white men’s.
” It’s a tragedy”, said Carina Marquez, associate professor of medicine in the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, the city’s largest provider of HIV care. ” We have such fantastic tools to prevent and treat HIV, but we are witnessing this significant disparity,” he said.
Outreach workers in San Francisco want the city to increase funding to continue reducing HIV disparities because Latinos are the ethnic minority with the lowest rates of receiving care there.
The San Francisco AIDS Foundation, for instance, would like more bilingual sexual health outreach workers, it currently has four, to cover areas where Latinos have recently settled, said Jorge Zepeda, its director of Latine Health Services.
The number of patients seeking treatment has increased from about two per month to about 16 per month at Mission Neighborhood Health Center, which runs Clinica Esperanza, one of the largest providers of HIV care to Latinos and immigrants.
According to Luis Carlos Ruiz Perez, the clinic’s HIV medical case manager, one of the challenges is connecting patients to bilingual services for mental health and substance abuse, which is crucial for keeping them in HIV care. Lacking funding, the clinic tries to promote its testing and treatment services more.
” A lot of people do n’t know what resources are available. Period”, said Liz Oates, a health systems navigator from Glide Foundation, who works on HIV prevention and testing. ” So where do you start when nobody’s engaging you”?
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© 2024 KFF Health News.
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