Deneshun Graves, a disease intervention specialist with the Houston Health Department, walks to a client's residence for a visit in Houston on Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023. “When you have a mother who didn’t know , it can be very emotional trying to explain ... it could have been prevented if we could have caught it before,” says Graves. State and local health departments across the U.
“It was devastating, really, because we had worked so hard to shore up our workforce and also implement new activities,” said Sam Burgess, the STD/HIV program director for the Louisiana Department of Health. His state was slated to receive more than $14 million overall, but instead got $8.6 million that must be spent by January 2026. "And we're still scrambling to try to figure out how we can plug some of those funding gaps.
“When you have a mother who didn’t know , it can be very emotional trying to explain ... it could have been prevented if we could have caught it before,” said Deneshun Graves, a public health investigator with the Houston Health Department. Its STD/HIV bureau was set to receive a total of $10.7 million from the federal grant, but will end up with about 75% of that.
The Mississippi State Department of Health was supposed to get more than $9 million in federal grant money over five years to expand its disease intervention workforce. Agency head Dr. Dan Edney said one of his top priorities now is finding money from other parts of the state's health budget.