Petrelis Files

CDC FOIA REQUEST FOR S.F.'S HIV NUMBERS

[This letter has been sent to the CDC via snail mail, email and fax.]


April 18, 2003

Julie Gerberding, MD
Director
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
1600 Clifton Road
Atlanta, GA 30333


Dear Dr. Gerberding:

As you know, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides more than $18 million annually to the San Francisco Department of Public Health for HIV prevention, testing and surveillance, with a significant portion of that amount going toward HIV Counseling, Testing, Referral and Partner Counseling and Referral Services (CTR/PCRS).

The DPH web site erroneously claims that CTR/PCRS “[r]eports are published yearly by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, AIDS Office, Epidemiology and Evaluation Section and HIV Prevention Section. They contain all HIV counseling and testing data from participating San Francisco Counseling and Testing sites that report their data to the San Francisco Department of Public Health, AIDS Office.” [1]

The error in this claim pertains to annual published reports. The DPH released the CTR/PCRS for 2000 on June 4, 2001, and since then, no other annual reports have been forthcoming. I expected the DPH to share the CTR/PCRS data for 2001 in the first week of June 2002, but they didn’t, and almost a full year later, the 2001 data is still missing. Surely it can’t be because of lack of funding to prepare and publish that year’s data.

Since the state of California lacks an HIV names reporting law, it is impossible to determine an accurate and verifiable number of new HIV infections. One of the best tools available to help gauge whether the HIV rate in San Francisco is climbing, stabilizing or going down is the CTR/PCRS report.

I therefore am formally requesting under the provisions of the federal Freedom of Information Act the following information from the CDC, pertaining to CTR/PCRS activities in San Francisco during 2001:

1. Number of visits to clinic and other health care settings for HIV antibody testing;
2. Number of HIV antibody tests performed;
3. Number of positive, negative and indeterminate HIV antibody test results;
4. All available demographic information on patients who took an HIV antibody test;
5. A breakdown by behavioral risk populations.

Last year, I wrote an essay that cited data from the 1999 and 2000 CTR/PCRS reports for San Francisco, to call attention to the importance of these reports.

Here’s what I said: “The report for 1999 noted that there were 4,118 anonymous visits, and that a total of 2,439 HIV tests were performed, of which 102 were HIV positive (4.2 percent). However, in the CTR/PCRS report for 2000, the researchers state that there were 4,526 anonymous visits, and 2,791 tests for antibodies to HIV were administered, of which 83 were HIV positive (3.0 percent). So even though there was a surge in the number of visits (up 10 percent) and the number of tests (up 14 percent) in 2000, the HIV rate in fact fell significantly, plummeting from 4.2 percent in 1999 to 3.0 percent in 2000, while at the same time the blinded HIV rate was not going up.”

Of course, I wonder if the CTR/PCRS report for 2001 will show if new HIV infections identified through this service were up, down or steady.

I look forward to CDC promptly replying to this FOIA request.

Regards,


Michael Petrelis
2215-R Market Street, #413
San Francisco, CA 94114
Ph: 415-621-6267

Cc:
Secretary Tommy Thompson, Health and Human Services
Dr. David Weldon, U.S. House of Representatives
Lynn Armstrong, CDC FOIA Officer

Source:
1. http://www.dph.sf.ca.us/Reports/HlthAssess.htm