New analyses by amfAR’s Public Policy Office show how community-based organizations are an essential to the U.S. HIV response and need funding.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently announced that it will no longer support a program that directly funds CBOs for critical HIV prevention activities, such as HIV testing and linkage to care for people diagnosed with HIV, among other services.
Published evaluations of the CDC-funded programs found that, in contrast to CDC-funded state and local health departments, which perform over 97% of all HIV screenings, CDC-funded CBOs:
- detected a far higher share of positives, yet conducted only 2.9% of HIV tests
- were more likely to identify new HIV diagnoses across geographic regions and groups, and
- link people to care sooner, and more often.
A follow-up analysis by amfAR evaluated the costs (after 10 years) of losing the CDC-funded CBO program. Without CDC-funded CBOs, amfAR found that:
- there would be 6,840 undetected diagnoses over 10 years that would lead to 1,993 avoidable infections, and
- treatment for the 1,993 infections that could have been avoided if the CBO program were in place would cost over $1 billion dollars to treat.
Read the infographics here: CBOs Are Critical to Ending HIV in the U.S., HIV Prevention Impact If Funding Is Lost, and Ten Years Without PS21-2102 (and technical notes).
