Pubdate: Sun, 04 Feb 2007
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2007 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Craig E. Thompson
Note: Thompson is Executive Director, AIDS Project Los Angeles
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

HIV TESTING IN THE PRISONS

Re: "Prison's hidden threat," editorial, Jan. 31

AIDS Project Los Angeles and other state and national HIV/AIDS 
advocacy groups have been working for several years to help 
legislators -- including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) -- craft 
thoughtful bills to address HIV/AIDS in prisons. These efforts would 
ensure that inmates get not only HIV testing but the medical care, 
drug treatments and prevention tools they need, including condoms. 
Too often, proposed legislation has targeted the prison population as 
a vector of new HIV infection when available research, such as the 
Georgia Corrections study you cite, indicates that a majority of 
infected inmates are HIV-positive when they enter the corrections system.

Testing inmates should help combat HIV/AIDS behind bars. But if we 
want to reduce the alarming HIV infection rates now being reported in 
communities of color, we will have to provide these communities with 
the same level of resources -- HIV and STD testing, care, treatment 
and prevention -- on the outside that Waters' bill would provide in 
the prisons.

CRAIG E. THOMPSON

Executive Director, AIDS Project Los Angeles
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman