California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a revised budget in the amount of $85 million after "additional cuts to child welfare programs, health care for the poor and AIDS prevention efforts."Rex Wockner says the Governator "decimated" AIDS services. He explains:
"Although the cuts curtailed state funding for HIV-related education (an 80% cut), prevention (80% cut), counseling (70% cut), testing (70%), primary medical care (50%), home care (50%) and housing (20%), one cut stood out in particular: the termination of all funding for the Office of AIDS' Therapeutic Monitoring Program. For some 35,000 working- and middle-class Californians whose HIV care is paid for by the state, that program pays for viral-load testing and drug-resistance testing. Viral-load testing is mandatory in HIV care, as it is the only way to determine if a particular HIV drug cocktail is working in a given patient. Drug-resistance testing comes into play when a drug cocktail that had been working stops working in a given patient. The two types of testing together guide a doctor in getting a patient on a new drug cocktail so the patient's viral load again becomes undetectable. Patients whose viral load is undetectable are very unlikely to develop deadly HIV-related opportunistic infections, and they are dramatically less infectious than those whose virus is not suppressed."
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