Daily HIV prevention pill urged for healthy people who are at risk

WASHINGTON Comedian Jon Stewart scolded Congress on Tuesday for failing to ensure that a victims’ compensation fund set up after the 9/ 11 attacks never runs out of money.

Stewart, a longtime advocate for 9/ 11 responders, angrily called out lawmakers for failing to attend a hearing on a bill to ensure the fund can pay benefits for the next 70 years. Pointing to rows of empty seats at a House Judiciary Committee hearing room, Stewart said “sick and dying” first responders and their families came to Washington for the hearing, only to face a nearly deserted dais.

The sparse attendance by lawmakers was “an embarrassment to the country and a stain on this institution,” said Stewart, adding that the “disrespect” shown to first responders now suffering from respiratory ailments and other illnesses “is utterly unacceptable.”

Lawmakers from both parties said they support the bill and were monitoring the hearing amid other congressional business.

Rep. Mike Johnson, R- La., predicted the bill will pass with overwhelming support and said lawmakers meant no disrespect as they moved in and out of the subcommittee hearing, a common occurrence on Capitol Hill.

Stewart was unconvinced. Pointing to rows of uniformed firefighters and police officers behind him, he said the hearing “should be flipped,” so that first responders were on the dais, with members of Congress “down here” in witness chairs answering their questions.

First and foremost, Stewart said, families want to know: “Why this is so damn hard and takes so damn long?”

The collapse of the World Trade Center in September 2001 sent a cloud of thick dust billowing over lower Manhattan in New York City. Fires burned for weeks. Thousands of construction workers, police officers, firefighters and others spent time working in the soot, often without proper respiratory protection.

In the years since, many have seen their health decline — some with respiratory or digestive- system ailments that appeared almost immediately, others with illnesses that developed as they aged, including cancer.

More than 40,000 people have applied to the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which covers illnesses potentially related to being at the World Trade Center site, the Pentagon or Shanksville, Pa., after the attacks.

More than $ 5 billion in benefits have been awarded out of the $ 7.4 billion fund, with about 21,000 claims pending.

Stewart and other speakers lamented the fact that nearly 18 years after the attacks, first responders and their families still have no assurance the fund will not run out of money.

The Justice Department said in February the fund is being depleted and that benefit payments are being cut by up to 70 percent.

“The plain fact is that we are expending the available funds more quickly than assumed, and there are many more claims than anticipated,” said Rupa Bhattacharyya, the fund’s special master.

A total of 835 awards have been reduced as of May 31, she said.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat whose district includes the World Trade Center site, said a 70 percent cut — or any cut — in compensation to victims of 9/ 11 “is simply intolerable, and Congress must not allow it.”

WASHINGTON Doctors should offer a daily HIV prevention pill to healthy people who are at high risk of getting infected with the virus, an influential health care panel recommended Tuesday.

The new guidelines aim to help cut the nearly 40,000 new HIV infections in the U. S. each year.

Screening people for the HIV virus also is critical. The U. S. Preventive Services Task Force reiterated its long- standing advice that everyone ages 15 to 65 — and anyone who’s pregnant — should be regularly screened, a step to early, life- saving treatment.

But the latest recommendations went a step further.

Studies show that if people who are still healthy take certain HIV drugs every day, it dramatically reduces their chances of being infected by an HIVpositive sexual partner or from injection drug use.

The approach is called PrEP, or pre- exposure prophylaxis. One brand — a twomedicationcombopillnamed Truvada — is approved for preventive use in the U. S.

The task force said PrEP is only for people at high risk of infection. That includes anyone with an HIVpositive sex partner; who has sex without a condom with someone at high risk of HIV; or who shares needles while injecting drugs.

The recommendations were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Other medical groups also urge Truvada for prevention, yet just 17 percent of people who might benefit were prescribed it last year, according to an accompanying editorial.

Private insurers follow task force recommendations on what preventive care to cover, some at no out- ofpocket cost under rules from former President Barack Obama’s health care law.

“How this recommendation will be implemented is of critical importance because cost is a major barrier,” Dr. Diane Havlir and Dr. Susan Buchbinder of the University of California, San Francisco wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine. They weren’t part of the task force.

Without insurance, the average monthly retail cost is nearly $ 2,000, they noted.

For the uninsured, the federal government last month announced that Truvada maker Gilead Sciences Inc. had agreed to donate PrEP doses for up to 200,000 people per year.