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San Mateo County, Calif., HIV/AIDS Services Could Be Impacted By Proposed State Budget Cuts, Official Says

A San Mateo County, Calif., program that provides in-home case management services for people living with HIV/AIDS, as well as other programs that assist people living with the virus, could be eliminated, forcing patients to obtain more expensive outpatient care, if proposed state budget cuts are approved, the San Francisco Examiner reports. John Conley, director of public health programs for San Mateo County, said case management services are alternatives to hospitalization or nursing facility care, which are more expensive. "Additionally, the state"s AIDS office will not allow municipalities to make reductions to case management activities or other requirements such as client/staff ratios, according to county officials," the Examiner reports. Conley said, the state is paying half the costs of the program, but the program is "becoming very, very expensive to run" (Koskey, 7/23).

WHO Stops Tracking H1N1 Cases

"In a move that caught many public health experts by surprise, the WHO quietly announced Thursday that it would stop tracking swine flu cases and deaths around the world," the New York Times reports. According to the newspaper, the announcement "perplexed some experts, and even baffled a WHO spokesman, Gregory Hartl," who "earlier in the day тЂ¦ had confirmed Argentina, with 137 swine flu deaths since June, had surpassed Mexico, where the epidemic began in February, as the country with second largest number of swine flu deaths." While the last WHO updated indicated nearly 95,000 people worldwide had been infected with H1N1, "[m]any epidemiologists have pointed out that, in reality, millions of people have had swine flu, usually in a mild form, so the numbers of laboratory-confirmed cases were actually meaningless" while tests "overwhelmed national laboratories," according to the New York Times (McNeil, 7/16).