HIV Program Scrambles for Funding : Health: Money for effort to help drug users, others will run out in January. Officials fear an increase in rate of infection if work stops.

County officials are scrambling for ways to save a program launched 2 1/2 years ago to stop the spread of HIV among intravenous drug users and their sex partners before funding runs out in January.

Since March, 1993, outreach workers have been hitting the meanest streets in the county to perform blood tests, pass out bleach kits for needles and encourage drug users to seek treatment.

During the brief life span of the HIV Outreach Intervention Project, workers have placed more than 85 county residents into drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs. Workers have also screened more than 1,200 county residents for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. So far, six have tested positive for the virus and have been referred for treatment.

Stephen Kaplan, director of the county’s Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, which oversees the intervention project, said many drug users, prostitutes and others may resume unsafe behavior that could expose them to the human immunodeficiency virus if the program is abandoned.

“They will just go back into hiding and we will lose them,” Kaplan said. “It’s a real public health issue. The risk of HIV rates going much higher is there.”

Intravenous drug users account for at least 11% of the 664 county residents infected with HIV since state officials started keeping track of the epidemic in 1982.

Physicians are not required to report HIV-positive test results, but state health officials estimate that there are between 900 and 1,200 HIV cases in the county.

Kaplan said the county started the intervention project when health officials nationwide began noticing increasing rates of HIV infection among drug users and their sexual partners.

Although he is not sure why, Kaplan said Ventura County has not seen a similar increase. One possibility for the difference, he suggests, is that unlike urban areas, the county does not have so-called shooting galleries where many drug users congregate and share needles.

“The [low rates] are why we thought this program was particularly important,” Kaplan said. “This is a good opportunity to keep them low.”

When a 22-year-old drug user from Camarillo, who declined to give his name, decided recently to get an HIV test, he stumbled across the county outreach workers in their white van near an Oxnard rail yard where he hangs out. If the county hadn’t come to him, the man said, he never would have bothered to get tested.

“It would be hard for me to get to a clinic,” said the man, who found out last week that he had tested negative for HIV. “I wouldn’t even go.”

It is precisely this attitude that worries Kaplan and other county officials. Congress has slashed funding for the Washington-based Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, which awarded the county the $347,453 in annual grant money. And Kaplan says that source will be forever lost.

Kaplan and others hope to find $75,000 from other federal or possibly state agencies to keep the program afloat until the end of the county’s fiscal year, June 30. This, Kaplan said, would give the county time to come up with a long-term funding strategy.

Another alternative would involve merging the program into the county’s Public Health Services agency. But Diane Seyl, the county’s AIDS coordinator, said the program would change.

“I think there is a lot of value to having peer counselors out there,” Seyl said. “Whether [the street teams] would be affected or not, I don’t know.”

Five days a week, four outreach workers hop into two oversized vans to make their stops at street corners, parks, supermarket parking lots and sometimes jails from Ventura to Simi Valley.

“We just look for where they’re dealing drugs and using drugs and then we go,” outreach worker Ken Porter, 43, said as he piloted a van toward a parking lot in Oxnard’s La Colonia area on a recent afternoon.

Once he parked, it took about 20 minutes for the first client to show up. A 21-year-old woman, who was expecting a second child and asked that her name not be used, had come for her HIV test results. The woman became worried about her health, she said, after having unprotected sex with her boyfriend, an intravenous drug user.

“I know I could always call a doctor, but I never get around to doing that,” said the woman, describing why she came to the mobile unit a week earlier for the blood test. “I needed to know for myself and my kid.”

Outreach worker Faye Jackson sent her on her way with a handful of a condoms and news that she had tested negative for HIV.

“Tell your boyfriend to come in and get tested,” Jackson called out as the woman headed home.

“It’s a good feeling when you give someone a result like that and they say they are going to change their risky behavior,” Jackson said, filling out paperwork on her clipboard.

But the outreach workers say they know the many promises they hear from clients often go unkept. Some, they say, pledge to go into treatment programs but don’t.

Porter said a prostitute in Oxnard recently confided to him that she was infected with the HIV virus and wanted to get help. But she never kept the appointments for treatment that Porter set up for her. He said he suspected that she was back on the streets.

“I wish I could have done more,” Porter said.

Some outreach workers know what they are up against because some have been there. Jackson used heroin, cocaine and crack through her 20s before she went clean five years ago after a long struggle to end her addiction. Now the 36-year-old mother of three is studying toward a counseling degree at Oxnard College and is committed to her work.

“I used to get high with some of the people we reach,” said outreach worker Victor Cisneros, 45, one of the project’s two phlebotomists--the persons trained to draw blood. “They relate to me. There is kind of a trust there.”

When word hit the streets that the intervention project may not survive through next year, many reacted like a 57-year-old man who said he has been injecting heroin for more than 20 years.

“It affects a lot of people including me,” said the man, who dropped by the van in Oxnard for a bleach kit and an HIV test. “There should be more of these vans around.”