Casa Ruby grant for trans people with HIV extended according to : Washington Blade

The possibility that as many as 30 transgender women with HIV would lose access to life-sustaining services provided by the D.C. group Casa Ruby on March 1 was averted this week when the D.C. Department of Health extended funding for a Casa Ruby case management program. She said that legal requirement applies to all grant recipients, not just Casa Ruby. As a stop gap measure, Gossett said DOH this week awarded Casa Ruby a "transition grant" that will use D.C. funds to enable Casa Ruby to continue its case management services to transgender clients with HIV until at least June of this year. Corado said DOH officials told her in October, when that grant was scheduled to expire, that they would renew the grant, saying they were pleased with the work Casa Ruby was doing. According to Gossett, HHS discontinued funding for non-medical case management services that Casa Ruby has been providing and limited its grant funds to only medical case management services, which involve work by physicians, nurses and other trained medical professionals.




It also means that people trying to conceive their own children no longer need to take special precautions, such as the uninfected partner taking HIV blockers. Yet the message that condoms are an effective defence against HIV is shouted from the rooftops, unlike the hesitation over treatment as prevention. For one thing, not everyone who has HIV is on medication or has undetectable virus, a detail that could get lost in the enthusiasm. It tracked nearly 900 gay and straight couples, where one partner was positive, through 58,000 acts of sex without condoms. "After 58,000 acts of sex without condoms, there were zero cases of HIV transmission"Doctors check that the drugs are working by measuring the amount of virus in the positive partner's blood.

Laws discriminating against people with HIV challenged in new bill

Senator Scott Wiener and Assemblymember Todd Gloria announced the introduction of a new bill on Monday that would update the state's antiquated decades-old HIV discrimination laws. At a press conference announcing the bill, Wiener credited Rick Zbur, the Executive Director of Equality California, for inspiring him to draft the legislation. During this time several laws were passed which would offer more serious consequences to those who were HIV positive than those who were not. Many of the laws were drafted in the 1980s during the peak of the HIV scare, when a diagnosis was equivalent to a death sentence. Of the more than 800 HIV-positive people who came into contact with the criminal system under these laws in the past three decades, 95 percent were convicted under the felony solicitation law.



collected by :Lucy William
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