The UA recently received a $360,000 grant to expand its services for HIV/AIDS patients.
The money was awarded by the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act to expand clinical services for HIV/AIDS, adding more patient coverage and more physicians.
The Ryan White Early Intervention Services Clinics in the Arizona Health Sciences Center provide comprehensive primary care for people with HIV/AIDS. Services include blood testing, examinations, dental care, psychiatric treatment and obstetrical support at an affordable cost.
Roberto Castrillo, program director for Arizona AIDS Education and Training Center, has been with the program since its inception at Kino Hospital and said the Ryan White funding could possibly increase AIDS research at the UA.
"The university is a research institution," he said. "So now, we can get into innovative AIDS research, hopefully."
Dr. Steve Klotz, director of the Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program and family and community medicine professor, said the funding comes at a critical time because there are an increasing number of HIV/AIDS incidents in Pima County.
"The exact numbers nobody knows," Klotz said. "But we have new patients every year."
Last year, the UA clinic served more than 300 patients, Klotz said.
Dr. Leonard Ditmanson, president of Pima County Medical Society, said Tucson is facing a "slow but steady growth" in the number of AIDS incidents, especially among women and nonwhites. Females make up 26 percent of patients in Pima County, the largest percentage of women for any Ryan White-funded program, he said.
Ditmanson said Kino Hospital has operated a Ryan White-funded program for seven years. But under the new grant, the UA has taken over administration of the Kino program while also expanding its own Health Sciences Center program.
The clinics cover people who are not eligible for medical-level service and don't have access to or cannot afford private insurance, Ditmanson said. About 70 percent of HIV/AIDS care is funded through the government, he added.
The Ryan White CARE Act is named after an Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS in 1984 from products used to treat hemophilia, a blood-clotting disease. After he was diagnosed, White faced discrimination in his hometown. Among other offensive acts, "fag" was written on his locker and restaurants threw away dishes he used, according to AIDS.net.
After a bullet was fired into his home, White became a national icon when he spoke out against misconceptions of AIDS, appearing on talk shows and testifying before the President's Commission on AIDS. White died in 1990 at the age of 18.
The Ryan White CARE Act is a congressional act offering funding to HIV-related services.
In addition to patient services, the HIV/AIDS clinics also have outreach programs, such as educational lectures at local high school.
"We have a whole venue of things we conduct throughout the year through the Arizona AIDS Education and Training Center," Klotz said.
Carol Galper, principal investigator of the Arizona AIDS Education and Training Center and assistant professor of community and family medicine, said the center has fellowship programs and training for people who wish to specialize as future AIDS clinicians because AIDS treatment is complicated.
Galper said national funding for such programs are based on the number of people infected in a given population, but many cases go unreported.
"It's critical for the community that it continue at a level that is sufficient to serve all the patients in Pima County," she said. "If there is underreporting of AIDS cases, then there are not enough services available."
Ryan White-funded clinics have been successful because they are approached from a patient care standpoint, Ditmanson said.
"There was a clinic site visited by a group that had written a whole publication on it," he said. "They interviewed a bunch of (AIDS) patients who said they were ecstatic about this."