Funding
Testing

James Grissom
HIV Positive
Steve Sherman
Coordinator, NC AIDS Drug Assistance Program
Peter Leone, M.D.
Medical Director, HIV/STD Prevention & Care Branch
Fred Wiggins
HIV Positive
Milford Evans
Benefits Advocate
Bart Haynes, M.D.
Director, Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology, part of the National Institutes of Health

Acute HIV Testing
AIDS Funding
AIDS Research
AIDS Volunteers

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North Carolina's AIDS Drug Assistance Program currently serves about four thousand people, yet there are many more who need help paying for their medications. Why isn't there enough money?
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The dollars that we receive to serve folks through the AIDS Drug Assistance Program come from federal dollars, through the Ryan White program, they come from state appropriations, and we also receive some rebate money from drug manufacturers. When you put all that together, it gives us a fixed amount that we have during the course of the year to serve people.

Unfortunately the amount of money we have doesn't go as far as it needs to go in terms of being able to serve everybody who qualifies for the program and needs the services.

When we reach the maximum amount we believe we can serve for the full year based on the number of people who actually use the program, we are forced, really, to start putting people on a waiting list. The last thing we want to do is enroll somebody in the program, bring them in and start serving them, and then somewhere down the road during the course of that year get into a situation where we find we don't have enough money to serve the people who we are serving.

A waiting list has been with North Carolina, unfortunately, on and off since the end of 1997 and, unfortunately, mostly on.

There are other funding needs as well - for example, prevention. How do you prioritize?
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It's a very difficult question to say which is the number one priority. I think clearly when you have people who are ill and you have some means to be able to help them improve or maintain their health status, which contributes in lots of ways, it's certainly an extraordinarily high priority. I think the other very important aspect, however, is that given the fact that we don't have a vaccine, given the fact that we don't have a cure, that prevention is also extraordinarily important because unless we all collectively, nationally and internationally, do a better job at prevention, then we're simply going to have more and more people who are infected who will need more and more dollars in the AIDS Drug Assistance Program and in the care arena to serve them. To differentiate and say ADAP is a higher priority than preventing the further spread of the disease is a very difficult decision, and I think different people feel differently. I think that we need to take care of people who are ill and who are low income, and when we know what it is and we have a resource - the drugs - that will help make a difference in their lives and maintain their lives, yeah, I think that's about as high priority as you can get, but we better do something in prevention also or we're just going to get further and further behind.