The Legislative Council will decide on Nov. 21 if a bill to restore funding for an HIV-prevention program backed by Rep. Jane Pringle, D-Windham, should be reintroduced in the next legislative session.
Pringle, a retired doctor, said last Friday that she and others supporting the program that educates youth have been working to present the Legislative Council with data.
Following the previous session, according to information from the House Democratic Office, the Maine HIV Advisory Committee was notified that the Maine HIV Education and Prevention Program had lost its funding.
Operating since the 1990s, the program has been highly successful, Pringle said, in preventing the incidence of new HIV infection in Maine teens. It has also had the secondary benefit of keeping the incidence of teen pregnancy and teen STD infection much lower than the national average, according to the press release.
“We’ve said this is an emergency because we just lost the national funding,” Pringle said. “If we don’t keep this funding going, we’re going to have an increase in HIV infections and an increase in teen pregnancies.”
Should the committee agree to forward the bill, a decision in the Legislature could come as early as January, or as late as April, Pringle said.
As Pringle explained it, funding for the HIV education program staffs health educators in the state Department of Education. In turn, those educators train middle school health teachers. In 2012, the program trained 420 local educators and reached 90 percent of the middle schools in the state, she said.
“This is a curriculum about making good choices,” Pringle said. “It’s called ‘Reducing the Risks.’ It’s been very, very effective in preventing HIV infections in teens and young adults.”
Pringle said that, in effect, the state has been punished by its effectiveness in combating HIV in young people. Maine has consistently ranked below the national average in areas such as the number cases of HIV in youth under the age of 19, the percentage of youth who have had sex or had multiple sexual partners and the percentage of youth who did not use contraceptive protection during their last sexual encounter, according to the House Democratic Office.
“The state applied for grants, but the federal grant criteria changed,” she said. “Maine has been successful and is now a ‘low-incident state.’ We learned last summer that there were no federal dollars, so the Appropriations Committee said no to funding.”
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