MIAMI — In 2018, Mike Ferraro was living on the street and sharing needles with other people who injected drugs when he found out he was HIV-positive.
“I thought it was a death sentence, where you have sores and you deteriorate,” he said.
Ferraro learned of his HIV status through a University of Miami Miller School of Medicine initiative called IDEA Exchange, which sent doctors and medical students to the corner where he panhandled. He got tested and enrolled in the program, which also provides clean syringes, overdose reversal medications, and HIV prevention and treatment drugs.
Under normal circumstances, it could have taken months for Ferraro to get on viral suppression medication, if he got on it at all. But the same day he learned his status, an IDEA Exchange doctor started Ferraro on a drug regimen.
His HIV is now in check, and he is recovering from drug use. “They save lives,” said Ferraro, now 55, adding that he was treated with kindness and respect and didn’t feel stigmatized, which encouraged him to enter treatment.
Launched in 2016, IDEA Exchange practices a new approach to treating and preventing HIV infections that combines telehealth with direct outreach, aided by more than $400,000 in grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies. The funding is part of a national effort launched by the White House in 2019, under former President Donald Trump, called Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S.
The federal initiative aims to cut the number of new HIV infections nationwide by 75% by 2025 and 90% by 2030. Officials hope to achieve those milestones by funding new, community-specific strategies to deliver care to hard-to-reach groups, such as people who inject drugs, and others who are living with or at risk of contracting HIV.
Federal health agencies have sent hundreds of millions of dollars to cities, states and territories hit hardest by the epidemic — many in the South. Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida were among the states with the highest rates of new HIV diagnoses in 2020, according to the CDC.
But people living with HIV, doctors, infectious disease experts, community groups and some of the nation’s top HIV officials say the initiative could miss its main 2030 goal.
“Do I think the whole country is going to make it there? I don’t think so,” said Harold Phillips, head of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy.
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