San Francisco's Getting to Zero initiative (Photo : Connor Radnovich, The Chronicle )
The city of San Francisco is giving an additional $1.7 million to the Getting to Zero initiative which aims to make the city free of new HIV/AIDS infections in the whole US.
On Thursday, city Mayor Ed Lee broke down the fund as follows: the city gives $1.2 million to reach high-risk people who are difficult to reach in the ongoing fight to eradicate HIV/AIDS; and another $500,000 comes from the MAC AIDS Fund - the HIV/AIDS charity arm of the cosmetics company.
"We want to have no new infections, we want to have no preventable deaths and we certainly want to have no stigma," said Lee, reiterating the main goal of the initiative to cut out HIV spread and reduce related deaths by 90% by 2020. "We can, in our lifetime, end this epidemic for everyone."
To achieve its aims, the city of San Francisco committed $54 million to weed out HIV/AIDS in the community. Part of this fund will be to pay officials employed to search out patients of the disease who would not seek medical help, and to reach high-risk individuals whose lifestyles make them open to contracting the virus.
The Getting to Zero initiative started in San Francisco in 2014, and focuses among other things on providing access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) - an HIV-prevention drug regimen. The initiative also aims to get people properly diagnosed, enrolled into the city's treatment program, ensuring they stay in care.
There were 2,332 new HIV/AIDS infection in 1992, but only 302 new cases diagnosed last year.
"We've made a lot of progress in San Francisco, but it's not over," Dr. Diane Havlir, chief of the UCSF Division of HIV/AIDS at San Francisco General Hospital. African-American gay men, transgender women, intravenous drug users, and other hard-to-access class of people are mostly diagnosed with new infections and the efforts to reach these have been ramped up.
MAC AIDS Fund is giving another $100,000 to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation; and further promised that all sales of its Viva Glam line of lip products will go the MAC AIDS Fund.
"What we say at MAC is, if you can sell a lipstick, you can save a life," said Karen Buglisi, global brand president for MAC. "We want to save a lot of lives."
