This week, Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Assemblymember Todd Gloria (D-San Diego) introduced Senate Bill 239, a bill to modernize laws that criminalize people living with HIV.
Following the Community Input Meetings in San Francisco and Los Angeles in October and November of 2017, the Executive Committee of the policy centers—consisting of investigators from the academic and community partners at both centers, as well as CHRP project officers—met to review the priority areas, identify commonalities and overlap, consider feasibility, and map out plans for the coming year. This letter summarizes the decisions we made during that meeting.
PrEP is a highly effective medication for preventing HIV. Those interested in PrEP and enrolling in a Covered California health plan should carefully weigh the costs of a Truvada® prescription, copays for regular doctors’ visits and laboratory tests, and monthly premiums. With Gilead’s copay card, PrEP is affordable (less than $400/year) on all Covered California health plans except Bronze plans. However, this does not include the cost of monthly premiums and assumes that medical and pharmacy deductibles have not been met. You can use Covered California’s shop and compare tool to see the cost of premiums in your area at ... [Read More];
Young gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (YMSM), particularly black and Latino YMSM, are at highest risk for HIV in California and across the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that if current rates persist, half of all black—and a quarter of all Latino—gay and bisexual men could be infected with HIV in their lifetimes. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a highly effective HIV prevention intervention that could drastically reduce the number of new HIV infections among YMSM. PrEP uses a well-established antiretroviral medication, Truvada, to block HIV infection in at-risk HIV-negative individuals. ... [Read More];
HIV criminalization is a term used to describe statutes that either criminalize otherwise legal conduct or that increase the penalties for illegal conduct based upon a person’s HIV-positive status. While only one HIV criminalization law can be found in federal law, more than two-thirds of states and territories across the United States have enacted their own HIV criminal laws. Some HIV criminal laws do not require transmission of HIV, and in some states, these laws criminalize conduct that poses a negligible risk of transmission, such as spitting or biting. California has four HIV-specific criminal laws, and one non-HIV-specific criminal law ... [Read More];
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