Most Americans live within five miles of a pharmacy and nowhere near an HIV clinic. A new national coalition is built around that gap, and Emory just signed on.
Emory's Rollins School of Public Health, based on the university's Druid Hills campus, has joined Rx for Change, a coalition working to bring HIV testing and prevention into community pharmacies. Rough Draft Atlanta reported the partnership Monday. The other partners are AIDS United, the Black Public Health Academy, and the National Pharmaceutical Association.
The target is PrEP, the daily medication that prevents HIV, and the communities across the South that have the least access to it.
"We are planning to bridge access gaps to bring HIV prevention, namely PrEP, the drug that prevents HIV, to the communities that need it the most," said Natalie Crawford, an associate professor at the Rollins School of Public Health.
The timing is not an accident. The coalition launched alongside Georgia Senate Bill 195, signed May 5, which expands what pharmacists can do as frontline providers and lets them prescribe PrEP directly. Backers, including National Pharmaceutical Association president Tamara McCants and Black Public Health Academy founder Leisha McKinley-Beach, argue that routing prevention through pharmacies could increase access points in the southeastern United States as much as 80-fold. The South carries the heaviest HIV burden in the country, and Atlanta has been one of its hardest-hit metros for years, which is why a logistics change this mundane is a big deal.
