Hopes High as AIDS Conference Returns to US

The International AIDS Conference is convening in the United States for the first time since 1990, after a travel ban on HIV-positive individuals was overturned by US lawmakers in 2008 and signed into law by President Obama in 2009. Organizers expect 25,000 participants, more than the usual 20,000.

The six-day meeting in Washington - organized around the theme “Turning the Tide Together” - begins on July 22. Key speakers include singer Elton John, former US president Bill Clinton, and philanthropist Bill Gates. Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar will address the conference by videolink.

The American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) will sponsor a pre-conference party on July 21 that will feature actors Sean Penn, Sharon Stone, and CNN newsman Anderson Cooper, who recently came out publicly as gay.

Other expected pre-conference events include a July 19 announcement by French Nobel laureate Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, the co-discoverer of HIV, of a new global strategy to work toward curing AIDS by tackling the reservoirs in the body where HIV hides after antiretroviral treatment.

The World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS chief Gottfried Hirnschall expects the central focus of the meeting to be the use of antiretroviral drugs as both treatment and prevention. WHO will be releasing new guidelines for pre-exposure prophylaxis.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called for an acceleration of current prevention strategies to end the pandemic. “If the current slow rate of decline in infections globally - on average just 1.5 percent per year over the past decade - were to continue indefinitely, controlling HIV/AIDS would remain a distant goal,” he wrote in the July issue of Health Affairs magazine.

The Friends of AIDS Foundation is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life for HIV positive individuals and empowering people to make healthy choices to prevent the spread of the HIV virus. To learn more about The Friends of AIDS Foundation, please visit: http://www.friendsofaids.org.

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