The top leadership of Fulton County’s health department will be absorbed into the state’s department by next summer, following the passage of a bill that removes the option for counties to have their own boards of health.
The bill, HB 885, is intended to increase cooperation between Fulton and the state following a series of health-related missteps. Two years ago, there was a tuberculosis outbreak in the county, and last year, the county revealed it had not been spending all the grant money it had received to combat HIV. Fulton’s HIV rate is among the worst in the country.
The bill passed the Senate Thursday by a 35-15 vote. Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford, said the point was to move the county department closer to the state. A handful of high-ranking workers will become state employees, though the rest will remain with the county.
Later, the updated version was approved by the House, 161-0.
The bill goes to the governor’s desk to be signed.
In objecting to the bill, Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta, said the change was “another in a long line of anti-Fulton County legislation.”
He said the problems Fulton was having were related to personnel issues, and that the department’s leadership had changed. Kathleen E. Toomey, a former country director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, started with the department this month.
“This kind of structural change is not needed,” Fort said. “I don’t know what the ulterior is, but I think this is the wrong way to go.”
ATLANTA'S WORST DESERTS & DIRTIEST WATER COMMUNITIES ARE SOUTHWEST, EAST POINT & BANKHEAD.
ATLANTA, Ga is the birthplace of Civil rights beacon Dr Martin Luther King Jr, a regional Mecca "too busy to hate", Hub for Southeastern Federal Govt offices and home of the Real Housewives of Atlanta.
ATLANTA is also a city infamously known for its many FOOD DESERTS and Poor Quality, Bacteria-filled Drinking water.
How can such a Progressive, Wealthy city of six millions residents, mostly BLACK, with so much Business Commerce, allow the majority of its BLACK citizens to prematurely Die from preventable diseases I.e. Obesity, Cancer, Diabetes, Kidney Failure and HIV, all of which derive from Atlanta's Food Deserts, abundance of Greasy Food, and Bacteria-Filled drinking water?
Is this being done intentionally for the purpose of Killing off low income BLACK residents of Atlanta?
Poor diets and inaccessibility to healthy foods are creating a crisis of chronic disease.
By Gracie Bonds Staples | The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In many ways, Evie and Ricky Sanders are lucky, and they know it.
On a good day, if their used 2004 Honda Pilot isn’t on the blink, it takes them no more than 10 minutes to drive the 10 miles from their home in Cumming to the nearest Kroger.
Ricky, 57, is a former flower nursery worker who is HIV-positive and struggles with the side effects of his medications. His wife, Evie, 58, is a former nursing assistant who suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They live in a three-bedroom wood frame house atop a small hill in rural Forsyth County, where they eke out a living from $1,500 in monthly disability checks and $25 a month in food stamps.
What the Sanders have learned is that, for them at least, even good days have a bad side.
“Most of our shopping is done from the carts where the markdowns are,” Evie says. “We can’t afford name brands.”
To make ends meet, they rely on the monthly supply of staples they get from There’s Hope for the Hungry, a nonprofit organization that feeds 26,000 North Georgia families a year, many of whom, like the Sanders, live in what the USDA calls food deserts. Their homes are located in low-income areas more than one mile from a supermarket or other reliable source of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Nearly 2 million Georgia residents, including about 500,000 children, live in food deserts. The USDA has classified more than 35 food deserts inside the Perimeter. More border I-285 in the suburbs of Cobb, South Fulton and east DeKalb counties.
Some experts say there is a direct correlation between food deserts and the state’s high rates of obesity and chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes and cancers. Stroke and heart disease are among the top three leading causes of death in Georgia, accounting for nearly one-third of all deaths in the state.
One day last January, the Sanders piled into their black Honda and headed to Kroger before the weekend rush. Ricky tuned the radio to 99.3 FM, his favorite country station.
Five minutes later they pulled into the parking lot and headed inside. Evie made a beeline to the restroom on the other side of the store while Ricky secured a shopping cart and waited near the store’s produce section.
(It's official! Washington D.C. has the highest HIV/AIDS rate in the United States. According to a report released by the city, one in 20 adults has HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and one in 50 has the full-blown disease. Combined, it's a 22 percent increase compared with three years ago.)
Saying that millions of federal dollars given to the District for HIV/AIDS treatment "have been lost, wasted and stolen by unscrupulous charities," two Republican congressmen called for an investigation Friday into how the city funds organizations that deliver AIDS services.
Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) sent letters to the Chairmen of the committees that oversee the District: Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), who leads the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.), who heads the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and District of Columbia subcommittee. Issa is a member of the oversight committee.
In the letter, the lawmakers cited a 10-month Washington Post investigation that found that the District's Department of Health and its HIV/AIDS administration had given $25 million in recent years to nonprofit groups with questionable spending practices. The Post investigation determined that the city did little to monitor spending and care.
"We are concerned that the lack of oversight over . . . funding is adversely affecting the District's most vulnerable residents, and therefore request the committee begin a bipartisan investigation to examine the District's funding of AIDS programs and services, including how federal AIDS dollars are spent and the oversight framework" of the Health Department and AIDS Administration, Issa and Chaffetz wrote.
The Post investigation found that in one case, the District awarded more than $1 million to an AIDS housing program whose ailing boarders sometimes lived without food, gas or electricity. More than $500,000 was awarded to a housing program whose executive director had convictions for theft, drugs and forgery. Twice, the inspector general could find no evidence that the director was operating an AIDS group.
Some AIDS groups failed to file tax returns or obtain a business license from the city, The Post found. Others submitted employee résumés with false information.
Towns was not available for comment, and the spokesman for his committee did not return telephone calls. A spokesman for Issa and other Republicans on the committee said they are awaiting the chairman's response to the request. Towns has the option of conducting hearings into the matter or launching a fact-finding investigation, the spokesman said.
On Oct. 19, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles announced a plan to launch an investigation into questionable nonprofit groups. The FBI launched an investigation into AIDS spending in December 2006, and that probe is ongoing, an FBI supervisor said.
Nickles vowed to work with the D.C. inspector general to probe the spending. He said he will give priority to organizations that are still receiving grants, including the nonprofit group Miracle Hands, which was awarded about $4.5 million between 2004 and 2008, including more than $400,000 for a job-training center that never opened.
The District has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection in the nation: 3 percent of the population older than 12, or about 15,000 people. Shannon Hader, director of the HIV/AIDS administration, said the actual count is closer to 5 percent, because many residents who have the virus that causes AIDS do not know it because they have not been tested.
(The CDC is expected to recommend that all babies in the U.S. be circumcised in order to reduce the spread of HIV. NBC’s Dr. Nancy Snyderman discusses the controversial issue.)
First HIV Vaccine Helps Prevent AIDS Infection For the first time, an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus, a watershed event in the deadly epidemic and a surprising result. Recent failures led many scientists to think such a vaccine might never be possible.
The World Health Organization and the U.N. agency UNAIDS said the results "instilled new hope" in the field of HIV vaccine research.
The vaccine – a combination of two previously unsuccessful vaccines – cut the risk of becoming infected with HIV by more than 31 percent in the world's largest AIDS vaccine trial of more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand, researchers announced Thursday in Bangkok.
Even though the benefit is modest, "it's the first evidence that we could have a safe and effective preventive vaccine," Col. Jerome Kim told The Associated Press. He helped lead the study for the U.S. Army, which sponsored it with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The institute's director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned that this is "not the end of the road," but said he was surprised and very pleased by the outcome.
"It gives me cautious optimism about the possibility of improving this result" and developing a more effective AIDS vaccine, Fauci said. "This is something that we can do."
The Thailand Ministry of Public Health conducted the study, which used strains of HIV common in Thailand. Whether such a vaccine would work against other strains in the U.S., Africa or elsewhere in the world is unknown, scientists stressed.
Even a marginally helpful vaccine could have a big impact. Every day, 7,500 people worldwide are newly infected with HIV; 2 million died of AIDS in 2007, UNAIDS estimates.
"Today marks a historic milestone," said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, an international group that has worked toward developing a vaccine.
"It will take time and resources to fully analyze and understand the data, but there is little doubt that this finding will energize and redirect the AIDS vaccine field," he said in a statement.
The study tested the two-vaccine combination in a "prime-boost" approach, in which the first one primes the immune system to attack HIV and the second one strengthens the response.
They are ALVAC, from Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccine division of French drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis; and AIDSVAX, originally developed by VaxGen Inc. and now held by Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases, a nonprofit founded by some former VaxGen employees.
ALVAC uses canarypox, a bird virus altered so it can't cause human disease, to ferry synthetic versions of three HIV genes into the body. AIDSVAX contains a genetically engineered version of a protein on HIV's surface. The vaccines are not made from whole virus – dead or alive – and cannot cause HIV.
Neither vaccine in the study prevented HIV infection when tested individually in earlier trials, and dozens of scientists had called the new one futile when it began in 2003.
"I really didn't have high hopes at all that we would see a positive result," Fauci confessed.
The results proved the skeptics wrong.
"The combination is stronger than each of the individual members," said the Army's Kim, a physician who manages the Army's HIV vaccine program.
The study tested the combo in HIV-negative Thai men and women aged 18 to 30 at average risk of becoming infected. Half received four "priming" doses of ALVAC and two "boost" doses of AIDSVAX over six months. The others received dummy shots. No one knew who got what until the study ended.
Thanad Yomha, a 33-year-old electrician from southeastern Thailand, said he didn't expect anything in return for volunteering for the project.
"I did this for others," Thanad said. "It's for the next generation."
All were given condoms, counseling and treatment for any sexually transmitted infections, and were tested every six months for HIV. Any who became infected were given free treatment with antiviral medicines.
Participants were followed for three years after vaccination ended.
The results: New infections occurred in 51 of the 8,197 given vaccine and in 74 of the 8,198 who received dummy shots. That worked out to a 31 percent lower risk of infection for the vaccine group. Two of the infected participants who received the placebo died.
The vaccine had no effect on levels of HIV in the blood for those who did become infected. That had been another goal of the study – seeing whether the vaccine could limit damage to the immune system and help keep infected people from developing full-blown AIDS.
That result is "one of the most important and intriguing findings of this trial," Fauci said. It suggests that the signs scientists have been using to gauge whether a vaccine was actually giving protection may not be valid.
"It is conceivable that we haven't even identified yet" what really shows immunity, which is both "important and humbling" after decades of vaccine research, Fauci said.
Details of the $105 million study will be given at a vaccine conference in Paris in October.
This is the third big vaccine trial since 1983, when HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS. In 2007, Merck & Co. stopped a study of its experimental vaccine after seeing it did not prevent HIV infection. Later analysis suggested the vaccine might even raise the risk of infection in certain men. The vaccine itself did not cause infection.
In 2003, AIDSVAX flunked two large trials – the first late-stage tests of any AIDS vaccine at the time.
It is unclear whether vaccine makers will seek to license the two-vaccine combo in Thailand. Before the trial began, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said other studies would be needed before the vaccine could be considered for U.S. licensing.
"This is a world first which proves that vaccine development is possible," said Dr. Supachai Rerks-Ngarm, the Thai Health Ministry official who oversaw the trial. "But this is not to the level where we can license or manufacture the vaccine yet."
Mass-producing the vaccine, plus how to proceed with future studies, will be discussed among the governments, study sponsors and companies involved in the trial, Kim said. Scientists want to know how long protection will last, whether booster shots will be needed, and whether the vaccine helps prevent infection in gay men and injection drug users, since it was tested mostly in heterosexuals in the Thai trial.
The study was done in Thailand because U.S. Army scientists did pivotal research in that country when the AIDS epidemic emerged there, isolating virus strains and providing genetic information on them to vaccine makers. The Thai government also strongly supported the idea of doing the study.
Sources: Huffington Post, Thailand Ministry of Public Health, MSNBC, World Health Organization, CDC, KTLA, NIH.gov, AVAC.org, HIV Research.org, Google Maps
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