Talk Bronx New York

Push in Bronx for H.I.V. Test for All

Dr. Donna Futterman, left, with Rosita Gonzalez and colleagues at Montefiore Medical Center, helped the city shape the plan.

The New York City health department plans to announce on Thursday an ambitious three-year effort to give an H.I.V. test to every adult living in the Bronx, which has a far higher death rate from AIDS than any other borough. The campaign will begin with a push to make the voluntary testing routine in emergency rooms and storefront clinics, where city officials say that cumbersome consent procedures required by state law have deterred doctors from offering the tests.

“Routine would mean if you came into the emergency room for asthma or a broken leg, we test everyone for H.I.V., if they’re willing,” the health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said in an interview on Wednesday.

While Manhattan has long been the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in New York, with the highest incidence of both AIDS and H.I.V., the virus that causes it, the Bronx, with its poorer population, has far more deaths from the disease. Public health officials attribute this to people not getting tested until it is too late to treat the virus effectively, thus turning a disease that can now be managed with medication into a death sentence.

Several AIDS experts said on Wednesday that the Bronx campaign was the most aggressive testing effort they could recall in the nation. Two years ago, Washington, D.C., made a high-profile push to test 450,000 residents, enlisting celebrity endorsements and distributing 80,000 free testing kits, but the campaign resulted in only about 45,000 people being tested.

“What’s new here is that we are implementing it on this large a level,” said Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the adolescent AIDS program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who helped New York develop the new program. “The Bronx has 1.3 million people. It’s bigger than most cities, bigger than Boston, bigger than Washington. We’re talking about a significant urban population.”

City officials estimate that 40 percent of the 830,000 people ages 18 to 64 in the Bronx have been tested for H.I.V. in the past year. Half of the remainder, about 250,000 people, have never been tested, and the goal is to test them first. Tests would be given at 40 designated sites, including clinics, community centers, churches and emergency rooms. Dr. Monica Sweeney, an assistant health commissioner for H.I.V. prevention, said the city had not set aside money specifically for the program, but would absorb the $12 cost of each test.

In organizing the campaign, which formally begins on Friday, Dr. Frieden has enlisted support from elected officials, health care providers and clergy members in the Bronx. But the proposal is raising some concerns.

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Soldier’s Ploy Backfires in Bid to Quit War

The door to the doughnut shop swung open. For a moment, the tall young man, every bit a soldier in his bearing, stood with the windy rain of Friday afternoon at his back. A wave of coffee and doughnut humidity slapped him in the face.

His eyes swept across the shop. Then he spotted the older man seated at a table over a cup of decaf. Their eyes locked. The prodigal son had come home. The father rose. They hugged, with lots of thumping on the back instead of words.

Nearly two years ago, Jonathan Aponte left the Bronx for Iraq, a private with the First Cavalry of the United States Army.

And on Friday, he was, at long last, home for keeps — but not from the war. He was just back from an eight-month stay on Rikers Island.

Mr. Aponte went to jail because he arranged to get himself shot in the leg on a Bronx street corner in a staged robbery, hoping for an injury that would be just bad enough to keep him from going back to Iraq. That part worked. But it was just one act in a Bronx soap opera that in many respects seemed to be a scaled-down version of the delusional ambitions of the Iraq war itself.

Home on leave for 10 days last year, Mr. Aponte entered into a marriage of extremely short duration with a young woman. The new bride either volunteered or was assigned to hire a gunman to shoot her new husband, carefully. She negotiated via text messages. Right after Mr. Aponte arrived in the hospital with his wounded leg and flimsy yarn about a mysterious assailant, the scheme collapsed, followed immediately by the marriage.

On Friday, in a doughnut shop on West Burnside in the Bronx, he retraced his steps.

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One Bad Apple Won’t Spoil the Whole Green Bunch

To mark Earth Day on Tuesday, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued its second annual “Green Apples and Bad Apples” report, which identifies five promising environmental developments and five things or places that aren’t so good for the environment. One of the biggest complaints: businesses that leave the doors open while running the air-conditioning at full blast. Our colleague Clyde Haberman has complained about this phenomenon in his NYC column, in 2006 and 2007, but it was interesting to see a leading environmental advocacy group take up the banner.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said in its report:

Whatever benefits it may have as a customer lure, this practice has significant adverse energy and air pollution impacts. According to the Long Island Power Authority, retailers increase their electricity consumption by 20 percent to 25 percent when they leave their doors open. And increasing power demand on the hottest summer days also leads to increased air pollution, as the auxiliary backup power supplies are called upon to meet peak demands. Unnecessarily boosting summer peak power demands can even make occasional brownouts more likely. In short, this is a practice that places personal business considerations over societal needs.

Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, has proposed legislation that would forbid businesses from leaving their doors open while air-conditioners are running. It is hard to say what the bill’s prospects are.

The defense counsel listed these other “bad apples”:

* The M.T.A.’s recycling program. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority does not provide separate recycling receptacles for paper and for metals, glass and plastic, as the transit systems in Chicago, Washington, Boston, Montreal and San Francisco do. The M.T.A. does perform “post-collection separation” — picking through the trash, after collection, to cull out recyclables — but that process, in which recyclables are mixed in with food waste and other trash before being separated, “inevitably leads to higher levels of contaminated recyclables,” according to the council. (The M.T.A. has provided large paper recycling bins at Grand Central Terminal for Metro-North Railroad riders.)

* The New York Organic Fertilizer Company and Hunts Point Wastewater Treatment Plant, both in the Bronx. Under a city contract, the fertilizer plant, which opened in 1992, treats several hundred tons a day of sludge from city sewage plants, drying the sludge and turning it into “pellets” for eventual use as fertilizer. The wastewater treatment plant, a few blocks away, treats raw sewage from parts of the Bronx (and from Rikers Island and City Island) before discharging it into surrounding waters.

* The former site of the Ridgewood Reservoir in Queens. The Ridgewood Reservoir was a major source of drinking water for Brooklyn in the middle and late part of the 19th century and into the 20th century. After 1900, as city relied more on its Catskill and Delaware system, the Ridgewood Reservoir was used and less; its last use under regular repair service was in 1959. The complex was transferred in 2004 to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which wanted to turn much of the area into recreational like bike paths and artificial-turf ball fields. “But the Reservoir’s water storage basins, empty for decades, now provide a unique area for observing the process of urban reforestation,” the council said. Read more..

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Riker’s Island Inmates Relocation Plans 

Western Queens elected officials are renewing their call for the city to reduce the number of inmates in Rikers Island, which is located in the Bronx but can only be reached from Astoria, and open correctional facilities in other boroughs.

The city Correction Department has been drawing up a plan that would relocate 25 percent of the inmates from Rikers Island to other facilities in the Bronx and Brooklyn in the hopes of lowering costs associated with busing prisoners from Rikers to courts all over the five boroughs, Deputy Commissioner Steve Morello said.

City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria) said the city’s current jail network is outdated and inconvenient to Astoria. He said thousands of prisoners, guards, legal staff and visitors pass through Astoria en route to the Rikers Island Bridge, located at Hazen and 19th streets, each day, increasing neighborhood pollution and traffic.

“Jail is meant to punish those guilty of crimes, but there’s no reason why our jails should punish the innocent residents of a single neighborhood,” he said. “Crime is a problem shared by the entire city and, therefore, the responsibility of handling our criminals should also be shared.”

Rikers Island, which has housed inmates since 1920, is technically located in the Bronx, but can only be accessed by crossing the Rikers Island Bridge in Astoria.

The Correction Department’s plan would include lowering the jail’s daily average of 12,000 inmates by 3,000 and housing inmates at jails closer to the communities into which they will eventually be released, Morello said. Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn has proposed constructing a new jail in the Bronx as well as reopening and doubling the size of the Brooklyn House of Detention (275 Atlantic Ave.), he said.

“The neighborhood has maintained 80 percent of the city’s jail population for many decades,” Morello said. “And Rikers Island is a long way from neighborhoods where inmates are from, making it hard for visitors and attorneys to come there.”

Morello said the completion of a new jail would take four years. The Corrections Department would need the City Council’s approval to acquire land for the jail, he said.

“One of the many burdens in this community is traffic from Rikers Island,” said state Assemblyman Michael Gianaris (D-Astoria). “Anything we can do to alleviate the burdens on this community would be welcome.”

SOURCE: TimesLedger.com

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Prison Locked Out of South Bronx Neighborhood 

Looks like no new jail for the South Bronx.

Well, maybe not.

No one seems to know for sure.

“My head is spinning trying to keep track of all this stuff,” said Miquela Craytor, deputy director of the group Sustainable South Bronx, which had sued to stop the project.

The New York City Economic Development Commission last week notified attorneys for Craytor’s environmental activist group that the city is no longer interested in building a $375 million, 2,000-inmate prison on 28 acres in the Oak Point section of the South Bronx.

The plans have been in the works for two years. Oak Point sits near Rikers Island.

City Department of Correction spokesman Stephen Morello said plans ground to a halt in part because “elected officials in the area made it clear that they did not support a jail at the Oak Point site.”

The Correction Department remains committed to building a jail, Morello said, to “increase the capacity of the city jail system by about 10%, house the people in our custody in a safe manner, and hold them in a facility close to the communities they come from and the courts they go to.”

Last year, Sustainable South Bronx penned a study that called for the creation of a $36 million “ecoindustrial park” on the Oak Point site that was to include a construction and demolition debris recycling plant as well as facilities for wood salvage and re-milling, plastics recycling and manufacturing, and processing glass powder for concrete and masonry blocks.

Craytor said several “green” companies contacted by Sustainable South Bronx had expressed interest in opening offices on the site.

The group has run a long campaign to clean up the South Bronx, which is home to several power stations, waste transfer stations and incinerators. The area has one of the worst asthma rates in the city.

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