[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 16]
[House]
[Pages 23401-23402]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



               COMBATTING HIV/AIDS IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters) is recognized for 5 minutes.

  Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, I join with the gentlewoman from California 
(Ms. Lee) and others who are attempting to work at doing something 
about the problem of HIV/AIDS in the black community. Mr. Speaker, we 
have spent over a year working in a very concentrated way on trying to 
garner the resources and redirect them to communities that are highly 
at risk but have not had the resources follow the crisis.

  Under my leadership as Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus last 
year, we organized an initiative where we were able to identify 
tremendous resources to begin to do what needed to be done. We 
discovered a number of things, Mr. Speaker. We discovered that the 
resources of government were not following the AIDS crisis because the 
face of the new AIDS had not been unveiled sufficiently in this Nation. 
Most people still think of AIDS as a white gay disease. It is not. It 
is not a white gay disease. If there is anything that I can share with 
you today, it is that the gay community has done a wonderful job in, 
number one, doing outreach, education and prevention and getting people 
involved in the new therapies that are causing them to have a better 
quality of life and being able to go back into the workplace. We need 
to follow that example. It certainly can be done.

  What do we find when we look at the African-American community? We 
find, of course, that it is the leading cause of death for African 
Americans between the ages of 25 and 44. What do we find when we look 
at African-American women? We find that in the new AIDS cases, we are 
30 percent of that population. We also find that we are infected 16 
times more than white women. And so we see this increase, we see this 
crisis, we see this emergency, and we are trying to get everyone to 
understand that it is indeed an emergency, it is indeed an emergency 
that

[[Page 23402]]

we can do something about. And we need to continue to get the dollars 
to flow into outreach and education and research and therapy, all of 
those things that will help our community to do what can be done to 
stop the escalation of HIV and AIDS infection.

  And so we got the $156 million and the RFPs went out and the 
responses came back and now we have community groups accessing dollars 
to do the kind of work that they so desperately have wanted to do that 
we have not given them the support for. They are saying to us, we have 
got to build and expand capacity, we have got to get more providers, we 
have got to make sure that we are doing the kind of creative outreach 
and education to get with that young population out there who we still 
have not been able to infiltrate. And so they are beginning to see that 
they can do these things and they can do them better.
  Let us not stop now. Let us take the initiative that has been put 
together by the gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands (Mrs. Christensen) 
and others who are leading us in the Congressional Black Caucus to keep 
the resources moving. Let us take this opportunity to be on top of and 
in front of this funding so that we do not find ourselves having gotten 
$156 million, having the proposals responded to and people beginning to 
do the work and all of a sudden cut off because more money is not 
following. I think we can do that.

  I am here today to add my voice to the efforts of the gentlewoman 
from California (Ms. Lee) and the gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands 
(Mrs. Christensen) and others who are working so hard to garner these 
resources.

  Let me just say that the gentlewoman from Oakland, CA (Ms. Lee) got 
her county to declare the emergency that exists there. My county in Los 
Angeles was slow but they finally did it. They finally looked at the 
data, the statistics, and they finally understood that they should have 
done this a long time ago, that in Los Angeles County we have not done 
what could have been done. And so we have got a lot to straighten out 
in Los Angeles County. We have got to redo the entire process. We have 
got to make sure that our organization with its task forces and its RFP 
responsibilities, all of that, are done in such a way that the 
resources will get to where they must go.

  Mr. Speaker, we will be back to talk a lot more about what must be 
done.

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