When the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill was passed a month ago, it included language that would effectively eliminate the only dedicated funding stream for school-based HIV prevention. $40 million. Gone.

Instead, the committee, consolidated line items from five areas of work within the Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at CDC to create an obesity-related chronic disease prevention funding stream. Consolidating funding streams is oftentimes more helpful to those on the ground:  applying for federal funding can take quite a bit of time for staff already stretched thin.  However,  when funding is consolidated, important line items can be lost.

In this case, federal funds usually allocated by CDC to the Division of Adolescent School Health (DASH) were included in this consolidation.

The outcome is that $40 million in CDC School Health funds used to help states and large urban school districts plan, carry out and evaluate youth HIV prevention programs will be lost.

This in spite of a new National HIV/AIDS Strategy highlighting the fact 25 percent of all new HIV infections are among young people and stressing the importance of comprehensive prevention education to bring down these rates.

In addition, the Strategy shines a spotlight on the central role played by poverty and health care disparities in the current HIV epidemic-- factors that disproportionately impact the nation’s largest urban school districts. 

Yet, many of the DASH funds at risk of being eliminated go to large urban school districts comprised primarily of youth of color, in communities with high AIDS case rates and high levels of poverty.

Ironically, in trying to streamline, the appropriators have sacrificed a unique CDC funding stream designed to breakdown bureaucratic silos by forging collaborations between departments of education and departments of health to reach youth most at risk in the one place where they spend most of their days—in schools.

HIV prevention among youth, especially among youth most at risk is vital to ending this epidemic. 

It’s time