Tag: HIV in Shelby County

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MSCS Students Gain Access to HIV, STI Testing, Treatment

Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition via Unsplash

A new partnership will allow Memphis Shelby County Schools (MSCS) to provide students and families with testing for HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STI), counseling, treatment, education, and more.

The Shelby County Health Department (SCHD) announced the partnership with MSCS last week. The health department said it wants to provide more resources for younger people who have been diagnosed with HIV and to be proactive in preventing the disease.

Shelby County has historically had one of the highest new infection rates for HIV in the nation. In May of 2024 The SCHD noted an “alarming increase in newly diagnosed cases of HIV in our community.” Officials said the highest increase affected people aged 14 to 45, and was not “spread evenly throughout the county.”

The spread of HIV among teens rose 50 percent from 2022-2023

“Preliminary data from the Tennessee Department of Health indicates the infection rate for people aged 15 to 19 in Shelby County increased by about 50 percent from 2022 to 2023,” the health department said in a statement. “Rates of new HIV cases among young people aged 15 to 24 years old in Shelby County are more than five times higher than the same age group in the United States overall.”

Shelby County Health Department director and health officer Dr. Michelle Taylor said that the impact of HIV and STIs on young people is “significant” and is further complicated by stigma and “a lack of access to healthcare resources.”

“Rates of new HIV cases among young people aged 15 to 24 years old in Shelby County are more than five times higher than the same age group in the United States overall.”

Shelby County Health Department

Prior to this announcement the health department, United Way of Greater Nashville, and John Snow, Inc.(JSI) hosted the first Shelby County HIV summit in October at the FedEx Institute of Technology at the University of Memphis. The summit not only facilitated conversations on how to coordinate efforts about HIV awareness and prevention, but how to address rising rates in Shelby County, which Taylor said represents a renewed sense of commitment to teamwork.

Taylor said, during these conversations, people realized that the health department had not been in MSCS, the largest school district in the state, since before the pandemic.

“It was a renewed sense of urgency to say, ‘Hey, why aren’t we in the schools?’” Taylor said. “Or, if we’re in the schools, ‘Why is it limited?’”

As a result of these conversations, Taylor and her team provided a memorandum of understanding to increase the health department’s presence at schools.

“Memphis Shelby County Schools services 106,000 students and a lot of those students are adolescents, people we know we need to educate with comprehensive sex education and teach them how to best protect their health in every way,” Taylor said. “We’re super excited.”

According to Taylor, education plays a large role in diminishing stigma and engaging young people. She said this still stands as a barrier to addressing HIV.

“Here in the traditional South, in what we know as ‘The Bible Belt,’ a lot of times stigma can get in the way,” Taylor said. “Stigma and stigmatizing people who are living with HIV gets us nowhere. Especially when we know even if you’re living with HIV you can live a long, fruitful life.”

Taylor said that HIV prevention and treatment have come a long way, resulting in more care for those living with the disease, which can aid in conversations that seek to address stigma.

“This valuable partnership with MSCS will help us provide our young people with the information, screenings, and preventive care they need to protect themselves. I am grateful to the Shelby County Board of Education and Memphis-Shelby County Schools leadership for putting the health of students and families first in making this beneficial collaboration possible,” Taylor said.

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LeMoyne-Owen Partners with Black Aids Institute Through HBCU-Centered Consortium

Photo Credit: LeMoyne Owen via Facebook

Students at LeMoyne-Owen College will have the opportunity to increase dialogue in Memphis regarding HIV prevention and care, and to also contribute to the nationwide fight for equity and wellness.

The Black AIDS Institute (BAI) has partnered with the school for the launch of its Black HIV Epidemic (BHIVE) program. LeMoyne-Owen was chosen along with Jarvis Christian University, Voorhees University, and Johnson C. Smith University for the Historically Black College and University (HBCU)-centered consortium.

BHIVE is funded by the Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA). Officials said the goal helps in their mission to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by engaging with students at these universities through education and internship programs.

Grazell Howard, board chair at BAI said they have the challenge and the opportunity to “revolutionize how we prevent and care for persons living with HIV.” She noted that these people are “thriving and living,” but that they also face the same morbidities that Black people do.

“We can no longer just talk about HIV,” Howard said. “ We have to speak about HIV and Black wellness in ways that our entire Black community can hear them.”

Shelby County has historically had one of the highest new infection rates for HIV in the nation. The Shelby County Health Department posted a notice on its website in May saying it had noted an “alarming increase in newly diagnosed cases of HIV in our community. Officials said the highest increase affected people aged 14 to 45, and was not “spread evenly throughout the county.”

According to AIDSVu , Black people accounted for 84.1 percent of new diagnoses in Shelby County in 2021, while accounting for 49.8 percent of the population.

The Black community is sometimes thought of as “diseased-burdened,” said, Howard. The prevalence of such problems as infant mortality and maternal child health is not because Black people “are so sick,” she said, but rather because these communities have been historically and systemically neglected in diagnoses, treatment, and care. 

The HIV virus affects those in minority populations more than others, but advocates and community leaders say that the “problem has never been strictly medical.” In 2023, James E.K. Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College, said a broader approach is required, specifically honing in on community leaders and organizations and the role they play in ending the virus. 

“To truly end the epidemic, we need community solutions that work in the context of those communities,” Hildreth said. “We also need to have communities work hand in hand — scientific community and healthcare providers.”

Howard said that being unapologetically Black and practicing activism every day has always been at the center of the work, but now they are adding revolutionizing treatment, prevention, and intergenerational care to their mission and message.

“We must be multi-generational in the message, and we must be true to ourselves,” Howard said. “We have to sterilize stigma within the race. What do I mean by that? We cannot have homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia.”

Howard said BAI is “radically partnering” and that this is where engaging students at colleges like LeMoyne-Owen proves to be both important and intentional, because HBCUs have long been bases of the Black community. The partnership allows them to bring communication and curriculum that can engage the Black community culturally.

“Historically Black colleges are hubs and nuclei in Black communities, whether you’re a college degree person or not,” Hildreth said. “Long before you and I were born, people would come to that campus, because that’s where the Black brilliant minds were. That’s where we could go to speak and think and create.”

BHIVE offers an approach that Howard said is “unapologetically Black.” The curriculum seeks to dismantle stigma in the race with a six-module course with components to be completed online and with practicum and internship opportunities available in the community.

“The community is friends to a campus and campus is friends to a community,” Howard said. “That will be this kind of symbiotic relationship which can go beyond HIV. If we do well in HIV, we’re going straight to wellness. If we can tackle HIV in our community and bend the tide of the virus, we can bend the tide for everything else. If we have a lot of pastors and university presidents — as they have at the schools I have named — we will be better off, because those leaders are courageous enough to know an HBCU campus is the hub for everything that impacts a community.”

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Shelby County, an HIV Hotspot, Forfeited $3M in Federal HIV Funding

Photo by Mathurin NAPOLY / matnapo on Unsplash

Shelby County continues to experience one of the highest HIV rates in the nation – designated one of 48 “hotspots” that are collectively responsible for half of all new U.S. infections.

Despite the urgent need for intervention, the Shelby County Health Department has had to forfeit more than $3 million of the $8.6 million in federal HIV prevention funding it has received in the past five years, according to information provided to lawmakers by the Tennessee Department of Health.

Credit: Tennessee Lookout

The funding came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which – until last year – provided Tennessee with annual HIV prevention funding, distributed through the Tennessee Department of Health to local health departments and nonprofit organizations. Between 2019 and 2023, Shelby County’s share of the funding ranged from $816,000 to $1.7 million annually.

But in four of the past five fiscal years, Shelby County failed to tap all available CDC dollars. The money can be used to purchase HIV tests, hire public health workers to administer them and perform contact tracing to identify potentially additional cases. Last year, the county drew down just $410,000 of its $1.5 million grant.

In an August 23 letter to lawmakers highlighting the unspent funds, Tennessee Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Ralph Alvarado blamed CDC bureaucratic red tape and understaffing by the Shelby County Health Department.

Alvarado-LetterDownload

A spokesperson for the Shelby County Health Department, in turn, blamed delays in executing contracts with the state health department, a process that also requires approval by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners and acceptance by county contracting officials.

The spokesperson also cited the Covid pandemic’s lingering impact over the past four years, as reassigned sexual health workers limited the number of HIV investigations funded by the grants.

Dr. Ralph Alvarado, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Health. (Photo: John Partipilo)

Losing out on $3 million in HIV funding in Shelby County has troubled advocates who work with limited budgets to educate, test, and provide resources to individuals impacted by HIV.

“Folks are making decisions between $3,000 medications and a roof over their heads,” said Cherisse Scott, CEO of Sister Reach, a Memphis reproductive health organization.

Sister Reach operates mobile vans that travel into underserved communities to offer testing and support. At $63 per HIV test, it’s a struggle to provide the service, she said. “The fact is those dollars have not trickled down” Scott said.

Rep. G.A. Hardaway, a Memphis Democrat, said Wednesday he planned to discuss the HIV expenditures with Shelby County health officials and local HIV advocates – and potentially the Tennessee Comptroller’s office, which is charged with investigating uses of public funding.

“Anytime we have federal dollars that cannot be spent in a timely fashion, we have to figure out why,” said Hardaway, who noted that local health officials may not have been in a position to responsibly spend money that came to them late in a grant cycle.

“We don’t want to get into a pattern where there’s too much red tape or we’re creating a situation where people are being rushed into spending in a way that would be ineffective,” he said.

Rising HIV rates

The letter from Dr. Alvarado outlining Shelby County HIV spending was sent in response to questions from Democratic lawmakers concerned that teens seeking HIV tests, along with other healthcare services, were being turned away from public health clinics if they did not have a parent’s permission.

Public health clinics began turning away unaccompanied teens on July 1st, shortly after Gov. Bill Lee signed a new state law requiring parental consent for healthcare services, the Lookout reported.

The state health department has since reversed course, instructing public health clinics to resume providing sexually transmitted disease testing and birth control to teens.

Rising rates of HIV in Shelby County sparked concern earlier this year when the Tennessee Department of Health and the Shelby County Health Department jointly issued a news alert. “Shelby County is experiencing a peak in a six-year trend of increasing HIV and syphilis infections,” Tennessee Department of Health Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tim Jones said in the new release. “Testing is critical in reducing these rates.”

The release noted a 36 percent increase in HIV rates in Shelby County since 2018 and a 40 percent increase among those 15- to 19-years old between 2018 and 2023.

The news has prompted renewed action among nonprofit advocates to stem the growing rates of HIV.

Conflicting disease data

But in his August 23rd letter to lawmakers, Dr. Alvarado said the number of newly diagnosed HIV infections have decreased in the past 14 months – a message at direct odds with previous public statements from his department.

Dr. Alvarado noted there had been a two-year backlog in investigating HIV cases at the Shelby County Health Department. Once the backlog was resolved, he noted, “there was not a significant, acute spike or ‘outbreak’ indicated, as reported by the press.”

Tennessee public clinics resume offering birth control, sexual disease tests to unaccompanied teens

The letter does not make clear how resolving the backlog in investigations resulted in fewer reported cases. Investigations, which include contact tracing to identify and test intimate partners, may result in more positive cases rather than fewer. The state health department did not respond to questions about the investigations.

Dr. Alvarado provided lawmakers with charts showing the number of HIV infections in Shelby County decreased from 358 in 2022 to 329 in 2023. Among teens in the county, the number of new infections increased from 22 to 37 during the same time period.

The data provided uses infection numbers, not rates of infections – a typical public health metric previously cited in health department press releases about HIV prevalence in Shelby County that measures the number of infections compared to population size.

The department did not respond to numerous requests seeking clarity on HIV infections in Shelby County.

Dr. Alvarado noted that the decrease in the number of HIV infections coincided with the rejection of federal HIV funding from the CDC by the Lee administration. Last year, Lee announced he would forgo all future CDC HIV prevention funding in a move widely seen as a politically-motivated effort to block the federal dollars from also going to Planned Parenthood clinics in Tennessee.

The state has since allocated its own funding for HIV prevention efforts. Shelby County this year received $1.7 million in state dollars and has thus far spent $885,000 on prevention efforts.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and X.

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Housing Programs For Those Affected By HIV Receive City Funding

Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash

HIV infections continue to grow in Memphis, prompting a closer look at not only new diagnoses but the livelihood of those currently living with the virus. 

Shelby County has historically had one of the highest new infection rates for HIV. The Shelby County Health Department posted a notice on its website in May saying it had noted an “alarming increase in newly diagnosed cases of HIV in our community.) Officials said the highest increase affected people aged 14 to 45, and was not “spread evenly throughout the county.”

As the virus is no longer considered a “death sentence” by professionals, strides are being made to ensure that those living with HIV are able to have an enhanced quality of life in all areas, including housing.

The city’s Division of Housing and Community Development presented its Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) grants back in July to nonprofit organizations in Memphis. According to information from the department, this funding was granted via the HCD Strategic Community Investment Fund (SCIF).

Close to $5.5 million was awarded to these organizations for community-based projects and initiatives through June 30, 2025. These grant awards included the Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG), HOME-Funded Tenant-Based Rental Assistance (HOME-TBRA), Neighborhood Partnership Grant (NPG), and Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS/HIV (HOPWA)

HOPWA grants totaled $3,755,700 with organizations Friends For All receiving $1.7 million, Hope House Day Care Center Inc receiving close to $1.6 million, and Case Management Inc. receiving $449,400.

Lenox Warren, CEO of Hope House, said out of all their programs, housing has the most “immediate and huge” impact for families, and funding from the city will help increase the amount of people they’re able to help.

The organization opened in 1995 and started as a day care center for mothers living with HIV who needed childcare, Warren said.

“It has quickly evolved into so much more,” Warren said. “We’re now a full-service, wrap-around organization that includes a variety of services including our housing program.”

In addition to adding mental health, education,  prevention and outreach services Hope House has added housing aid in hopes of “breaking down barriers that come to living a healthy life with HIV” Warren said.

Warren noted that while HIV is classified as a “chronic disease” as opposed to a “death sentence,” it can be more difficult to manage while living in poverty.

“If you don’t know where you’re going to send your kids the next day, where y’all are going to sleep that night, or even how you’re going to eat so you can take your medications, that’s a really hard thing to figure out how to keep yourself healthy, while also surviving day-to-day.”

Yolanda Fant, housing supervisor for Hope House, said they are currently serving 74 clients, with six of those clients being added as a result of the city’s funding.

“It takes them from not being secure in where they’re going to be able to take care of their family, to knowing that they have secure housing,” Fant said. “That also helps them to take their medication and helps with viral suppression.”

Viral suppression refers to reducing the levels of the virus in the body so that it isn’t spreadable. Warren said their viral suppression rate among the people who use their services is 13 percent higher than the rate across the city.

Hope House’s goal is to help more people and to increase the city’s viral suppression rate, and said the funding from the city helps them meet their goal. Warren said they can’t do this work alone and there hasn’t been enough funding, so partnering with the City of Memphis has been “huge” for them.

Warren said they are always seeking funding from other sources as there is always a need for these services. They’ve historically had “hundreds” of people on their waitlist for their housing program, with Fant saying she turns “at least three people away” a day. Warren reiterated that they plan to expand these services with the help of their HOPWA grant.

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Researchers and Community Leaders Seek Equity-Driven Approach to End HIV

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While strides are being made to end the HIV epidemic, it is still considered a “worsening public health crisis in the United States.” It has also proven to disproportionately affect Black Americans.

Darwin Thompson, director of public affairs at Gilead Sciences, said there is also a disproportionate impact in the southern United States. Information released by Gilead Sciences and Meharry Medical College said “southern states accounted for 51 percent of new HIV diagnoses in 2020.” 

“To add onto these troubling statistics, Black Americans make up 42 percent of new HIV diagnoses. A higher proportion than any other racial or ethnic group,” said Thompson.

In Tennessee, Thompson said Black Americans accounted for 58 percent of new HIV diagnoses. He also said there has been a “sharp increase” in legislative attacks against the LGBTQ+ community and other groups that are more affected by HIV.

Thompson said while HIV is no longer considered a “death sentence,” a new “equity-driven” approach is required to address the social and cultural issues that contribute to the spread of the disease. “Many people who live in the southern U.S. face a multitude of serious societal and systemic challenges that fuel the epidemic including the burden of poverty, stigma, prejudice, low health literacy, and lack of insurance and access to care,” said Thompson.

In hopes of collaborating with community-based organizations, Gilead launched its COMPASS initiative in 2017 for “HIV advocacy focused on evidence-based policies.” One of the partners of the COMPASS initiative is Relationships Unleashed, a nonprofit organization based in Memphis. 

Gwendolyn Clemons,  executive director of Relationships Unleashed, said the mission of the organization is personal to her, as she lost her sister, who died a year after being diagnosed with HIV. “The lack of education and understanding of HIV in the Black community, along with stigma associated with it, both exist in our community,” Clemons said. 

Clemons said Shelby County has one of the highest new infection rates for HIV. In March, the Flyer reported that Shelby County ranked number three in “incidence rates of new HIV infections in the United States,” and the disease disproportionately affected those in minority populations.

“One area in particular that we found problematic in Memphis, was the continuous rise of new HIV diagnosis in Black, same-gender loving men, and Black cisgender women,” said Clemons. “The city that we love so much has continuously been ranked in the top 10 of diagnoses for years.”

James E.K. Hildreth, president of Meharry Medical College, said the problem of HIV has never been “strictly medical.” He said that a broader approach is required, specifically honing in on community leaders and organizations and the role they play in ending the virus.

“To truly end the epidemic, we need community solutions that work in the context of those communities,” said Hildreth. “We also need to have communities work hand in hand — scientific community and healthcare providers.”