Health
HIV time bombs in Mississippi infected with COVID
Senergy HIV diagnosis Twenty-four years ago, Laurie Ann Lewis could count the number of missed quarterly blood test appointments. Both were this spring.
For patients who cause deadly viruses AIDSRegular blood sampling is the only way to make sure that their medication is controlling the viral load. But as another example of an infectious disease, COVID-19 (new coronavirus infectious disease) (# If there is no character limit, add parentheses when first appearing, Lewis’ doctor, who surged earlier this year, told her to stop coming. The lab was overwhelmed by the coronavirus test. Blood work for HIV patients will have to wait.
Lewis, a three-year-old 56-year-old mother in Jackson, Mississippi, explains that living with a compromised immune system is scary, even at its best. Now is not the best time.
“I’m scared of my life,” Lewis told Daily Beast. “I don’t know what my count is, so I don’t know if I’m healthy enough to go anywhere. I can’t even see a child. I’m just sitting at home.”
Two hours from Highway 49, nurses at Aaron E. Henry Community Health Center, a network of federally operated clinics in northwestern Mississippi, typically perform about 250 HIV tests monthly. Like many pockets in the South, HIV is embedded in this rural part of the state, where (in some counties) nearly 1% of the adult population lives with HIV, three times the national average. It is a percentage.
“I’m scared to confirm it literally. “
— Deja Abdul Hack
However, in April and May, clinic nurses did not test HIV once. Instead, CEO of the clinic, Aurelia Jones-Taylor, said that all of Aaron E. Henry’s HIV resources, from testing to transportation and community engagement, were moved to coronaviruses.
“We put everything on hold. Our focus at this time was COVID, even for people with HIV,” Jones-Taylor said.
COVID-19 has transformed healthcare practice across the United States for several months. It frightens people from visiting doctors to prevent and complicate elective surgery and to see them regularly, and encourages home births. However, when it comes to preventing HIV and AIDS in the Deep South, a region that is extremely vulnerable to both AIDS and COVID-19, the coronavirus pandemic not only delayed normal HIV prevention efforts, but I derailed it. Both illnesses disproportionately damage the color community, and in overburdened medical systems, focusing on one can mean making both runaway.
“HIV is still a crisis. And it’s a major crisis here in the south. But as we are responding to the COVID crisis, it was pushed to the side,” Derrick, executive director of the AIDS Union in the South. Wilson said.
Particularly dangerous about this is that COVID-19 affects many of the same communities, especially blacks, and is the worst victim of HIV and AIDS.
“If you look at the heat map of people with COVID and those who die of COVID and the HIV prevalence, it looks almost the same,” he said.
By early summer, Aaron E. Henry’s work had begun to return to normal. In the third week of June, a clinic nurse tested three patients for HIV. But in the same week, the coronavirus infection rate surged throughout the southeast, with a few more places than Mississippi, New daily infections in June almost tripled A total of about 30,000 cases.
“The second wave hurt us and it’s getting bigger and bigger. The tsunami is hitting us now,” said Jones Taylor.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a statement to The Daily Beast, saying that the organization “reduced testing availability and limited access to treatment and prevention services. [for HIV] It can lead to more infections and poorer health in the long run. “
Those who were directly involved in caring for HIV patients were more candid.
“This is a powder barrel.” Deja Abdul-Haqq, head of development for My Brother’s Keeper, a community-based non-profit organization working to reduce health disparities in underserved Mississippi. It was. “HIV requires space, space, and a lack of attention. This is how we first arrived here without paying attention to HIV. This time, if we turn our backs, we think Is it?”
“I’m literally scared to see the numbers,” she added.
But if Abdul Huck wanted to see if the infection rate had risen in the past few months, she couldn’t. A Mississippi Department of Health spokesperson has since February said that manpower has been updated to update the infectious disease report, a central function of the public health sector to list all new infections from HIV and tuberculosis to the West Nile virus. No,” I told the Daily Beast.
The bitter irony for many of these health workers is that COVID-19 forced them to turn their back on HIV at the very moment that the federal government finally invested more resources in an ongoing epidemic.
40 years since the first case of HIV was documented New York City and San Francisco, The epicenter of this disease has moved from a coastal city to the Deep South. 16 states that make up the South Account 51% According to the CDC of all new HIV infections.
However, within a few weeks of receiving the new federal funding earlier this year, parliament further reduced 58 of the 60 organizations that received these dollars through the CARES Act, now a pandemic stimulus. I sent $90 million. For both grant recipients, the message was clear: Focus on COVID-19.
“It was a duty,” said Jones Taylor. “There were specific benchmarks we had to stake in funding the (CARES Act).”
According to Dr. Laura Cheever, Associate Administrator of the Department of Health and Resources Services HIV / AIDS Department, the federal agencies that have distributed both HIV epidemic and CARES legislation to these providers are a bit more complicated. She argued that the funding of the CARES Act was aimed at allowing providers to integrate COVID-19 care into HIV care rather than overturning the HIV dollar.
“I didn’t think… the CARES legislation would push HIV back,” Cheever said.
The problem, Wilson said, is that the US public health system is not equipped to manage two public health crises at once. As the federal dollar grows, the infrastructure and people needed to handle two public health emergencies do not exist.
“So, if you use a system that lacks resources or resources to ask you to respond to another crisis, you have to ignore one of those crises,” Wilson said.
“The South is where we are currently seeing the most cases. All because leadership failed to pay attention to history.“
— Derrick wilson
A good example of what this looks like is the Mississippi Department of Health, which has cut its funding by more than 10% since 2017. Dr Lucius Lampton, who sits at the State Health Commission, said nurses are primarily focused on tracking contacts, and these teams were created to track infections like tuberculosis and HIV. Despite the fact that because of the coronavirus. He said he wasn’t surprised that the authorities didn’t have the resources to update infectious disease statistics. He also said he has multiple jobs, even in leadership.
“Dr Dobbs had to do some paperwork to maintain the website.” “He had to enter the data (at COVID) himself.”
“I can’t say I have to divert my attention from core public health activities,” he said.
Mississippi Department of Health’s Communications Director, Liz Charlotte, denied that the state’s chief physician was entering the data, but Dobbs admitted “probably a three-hour sleep a night.” .. We filled up our hands. ”
Still, as Cheever of HRSA points out, HIV care providers are infectious disease specialists with many years of experience in the communities they serve, and at the local level, public health crises like coronaviruses. A feature that is uniquely positioned to address.
And those at the forefront of HIV and COVID-19 recognize that there are similarities in viruses, both in how they are transmitted and in those who are infected.
“It’s an interesting parallel that both COVID and HIV are spread by the same human desires,” Wilson said. “They are both spread by a desire for human connection, whether it is sexual or social, which is a common trait of both. So we Must take into account their commonality in their approach to disease.”
Both viruses have excessively affected racial and ethnic minorities. Black American is hospitalized for coronavirus Five times the rate of white Americans.. Similarly, black Americans make up only 13% of the U.S. population, but 42% of new HIV infections.
And although both HIV and COVID-19 started on the coast, they probably do some of the longest-term damage in the south. Probably because state authorities were reluctant to deal with either illness.
“I don’t think this is the second wave in the South. I think this is the pattern seen with HIV. HIV primarily originated from epicenters in New York and Northern California, after which they responded and needed. We did all that, but the southern states didn’t respond so fiercely, and there was a sudden shift, and then the south became the most HIV-dense place,” Wilson said.
“This is exactly what happened at COVID,” he continued, “since leadership couldn’t pay attention to history, the South is where we are now seeing the most cases. .”
A spokesperson for Governor Tate Reeves, Mississippi, said the governor is wary of rising infection rates but cannot control the actions of the Mississippians.
“At the moment, people aren’t even following the rules, which are less restrictive. We’re very concerned about the increase in numbers, which is primarily a sign of those who give up their mission, not to ease the measures. I believe that.
Sean Kelly, director of medicine at the Vanderbilt Integrated Care Clinic, home of the Southeast AIDS Training and Education Center, said he was looking for a silver lining. One of them is that the risk of infection posed by COVID and face-to-face treatment has significantly expanded the way clinics use telemedicine, and Kelly expects many will be adapted to treat HIV. It says that.
But as coronavirus infections are skyrocketing across the country, especially in the southeast, Jones Taylor is concerned that this may not happen for a long time.
“We are convinced that we can increase testing to identify patients who may need to take the drug,” she said. “But you don’t intend to make up for lost time. Lost time is lost time.”
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