SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Workshops on safe sex in San Francisco’s Mission District. HIV-prevention skits developed by teenagers in Chicago. A ministry that counsels black women in Baltimore, where syphilis rates are shockingly high.

All are among the programs that could lose funding under the new HIV prevention strategy from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which calls for increased attention to people who are already HIV-positive.

CDC officials say they intend to pay for the new initiative by diverting $42 million that now goes to nonprofit groups like those in San Francisco, Chicago and Baltimore, whose work with uninfected people has been the norm for keeping the virus from spreading.

The plan, unveiled in April, faces mounting criticism from advocates and some federal lawmakers, who say it will shortchange proven prevention methods and represents a dangerous shift in the government’s effort to combat HIV. They’ll be pressing for more answers at the CDC’s upcoming National AIDS Prevention Conference, in Atlanta.

“You can’t argue with an initiative that centers its AIDS-prevention efforts on people who carry and can actually spread the disease,” said Debra Fraser-Houze, president of the National Black Leadership Council on AIDS. “But one that only focuses on people who are already HIV positive, and takes no responsibility for prevention among people who are not yet positive is insane and, I feel, genocidal.”

The CDC’s change threatens 211 community-based organizations nationwide, most of which serve minority communities and other populations that are at the highest risk of developing AIDS.

In announcing the new strategy, CDC director Julie Gerberding said it was clear that existing prevention efforts have “stalled.” She cited rising STD rates in many U.S. cities, and noted that an estimated one-quarter of the more than 800,000 people living with HIV are unaware of their status.

About 40,000 more people in the United States are diagnosed with HIV every year; the CDC hopes to reduce that by half by 2005.

Dr. Robert Janssen, director of the Division of HIV/AIDS prevention at CDC, said in an interview that the agency doesn’t plan to stop funding traditional prevention activities in the U.S., but they will represent “a smaller share” of federally supported efforts.

“What we don’t want to do is just hand out condoms and brochures,” he said.

Janssen said community-based non-profits may reapply for grants and have a good chance of receiving them if they redesign their programs to focus on HIV-positive populations.

If they don’t, their CDC funding will likely run out in May.

They can still apply for money from $140 million in prevention funding the CDC provides to state and local health departments, although those agencies also are being directed to make targeting people already infected with AIDS their top priority.

Many advocates suspect the new initiative is motivated as much by politics as by science. Gerberding’s April announcement came without any input from long-established AIDS advocates and on the heels of the CDC’s audit of Stop AIDS, a San Francisco prevention program that has run workshops congressional conservatives deemed obscene.

“The conservatives, for a very long time, have worried that this kind of money for education and prevention efforts was just community development money for homosexuals and drug users,” said Steven Tierney, director of HIV Prevention for the San Francisco Health Department.

Janssen rejected the idea that the shift was political.

“All of the recommendations in the initiative we have been talking about for a number of years,” he said. “This all started in the Clinton administration.”

Still, David Holtgrave, a predecessor of Janssen’s at the CDC and now a professor of public health at Emory University in Atlanta, said “it’s fair” for advocates to be concerned about cuts in HIV-prevention programs that have been shown to be effective.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers are urging the Bush administration to reconsider the changes.

The Human Rights Campaign called for a renewed national commitment to comprehensive science-based HIV/AIDS prevention efforts in light of new findings from the CDC indicating HIV infections among gay and bisexual men rose 7.1 percent from 2001 to 2002.

“These numbers are a national tragedy and should be seen as a wake-up call that we need a swift and sweeping national commitment to a comprehensive science-based prevention plan to combat HIV/AIDS in this country,” said HRC Political Director Winnie Stachelberg.