HIV Gift Card Outreach

As the holiday season quickly approaches, many of us will be going the easy route and purchasing gift cards for our loved ones, friends, colleagues and neighbors. After all, who doesn’t love receiving a gift card? They are given out in lieu of Christmas bonuses at corporations, they are given out as a reward for buying a high ticket item at an electronics store and they are given out as a way to stop the spread of AIDS. Wait, what was that last one? In a desperate bid to help stop the HIV/AIDS epidemic, health officials at the Centers for Disease Control are investing in a new modern strategy: they are offering $100 in gift cards to influential gay men to promote the use of condoms, HIV testing and safe sex to the rest of the gay community.

A similar project was launched in North Carolina and proved to be a success. The CDC is hoping this type of project can be just as successful in the over 200 communities they are launching it in within the next two years. With HIV rates still steadily increasing amongst bisexual and gay men, the CDC is willing to try anything to bring those rates back down. Richard Wolitski, the director of the HIV/AIDS Prevention program in the CDC states, “The CDC is committed to ensuring that its resources are going to the populations hardest hit by the epidemic.” In addition to the $1.5 million dedicated to the gift card project, the CDC is also fronting $5 million for a campaign aimed at black bisexual and gay men that will encourage HIV testing.

Despite the millions being funneled into these HIV projects, some critics, including Julie Scofield of the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, feel that the money being spent for HIV awareness and prevention is nowhere near what it should be. Scofield says, “It’s a drop in the bucket.” Since 2001, the CDC’s budget for HIV awareness and prevention has been approximately $700 million. Despite continually rising costs, this budget has not increased from that amount. What is alarming about this is the new data that the CDC has released which shows that in 2006, there were an estimated 56,300 new HIV infections; this is a tremendous leap from the 40,000 new infections a year in previous years. New data reports from the CDC have shown that while infections are decreasing for those who inject drugs and who are heterosexuals, infections are actually increasing for gay and bisexual men, especially those who are African-American.

Due to this increasing trend, AIDS advocates are encouraging that more money be targeted towards the gay community. They feel that politicians do not focus on the HIV threat towards gay men as they once did in the 1980s and instead have focused more on HIV as a threat to the general population. Leroy Blea, a health official out of California feels that the gay community is “not a very easy population to fund. It’s often more politically viable to fund programs for women and children and youth.” Currently, the CDC allocates approximately 40% of its funding to target bisexual and gay men; however, with over 50% of HIV infections happening in the gay community, this funding is simply not enough. David Holtgrave from John Hopkins University states, “At a minimum, we need to be matching percentages to where the epidemic is.”

As for the gift card outreach, the CDC will be giving four $25 gift cards and HIV awareness and prevention materials to gay men they feel are influential in gay communities across the nation. These gay men will be asked to promote safe sex with condoms. Previous efforts on this type of project showed an increase of gay men having safe sex, according to research published in the American Journal of Public Health. In 2005, the research showed an over 30% reduction in unprotected homosexual sex and an approximately 40% reduction in the number of sexual partners.