WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration vowed Tuesday to attack complacency about the nation's HIV/AIDS epidemic with the first media barrage aimed at the public in two decades.
The campaign, unveiled during a White House ceremony, will hammer home the theme that every 9 1/2 minutes, someone in the USA is infected with HIV, for an estimated total of 56,300 new cases each year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will spend $45 million over five years for radio ads, transit signs, airport dioramas, online banner ads and online videos in English and Spanish.
"The campaign will confront complacency and put HIV/AIDS back on the nation's radar screen," says Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC's HIV/AIDS prevention programs.
The last time the federal government launched an HIV education campaign, in 1987, it was called America Responds to AIDS and cost about $7 million to develop, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a partner in the new campaign. The 1987 effort included public service television ads that aired more than 59,000 times and a brochure mailed to 107 million homes.
The new campaign will attempt to recapture some of the urgency that characterized the epidemic's early days. Future phases will target African Americans and Latinos, groups that suffer disproportionate cases of HIV.
Jeffrey Crowely, director of the White House Office of AIDS Policy, says the administration's messages will be shaped by "what works and what doesn't" in the context of a national AIDS strategy.
The White House website offers some clues to what that strategy might include. It says President Obama supports "age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception," distributing contraceptives through the public health system and lifting the ban on federal funding for needle exchange, "which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users."
David Holtgrave of Johns Hopkins University noted that an "investment of $9 million a year isn't going to reduce HIV infections in the United States."
"It's an important piece of the puzzle but not the whole puzzle," he says.
Holtgrave has calculated that the CDC's prevention budget would have to grow from $800 million a year to $1.3 billion to cut the number of new HIV infections in half, through large-scale counseling and testing programs, preventive services for people with HIV and targeted programs for those most vulnerable to infection.
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
Copyright 2009 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.