International AIDS Conference Opens Associated Press
go to original July 23, 2012

Geojina Gutierrez, right, of Mexico City, walks in the AIDS March in Washington, on Sunday, July 22, 2012. (AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

The International AIDS Conference opened Sunday evening with a call for governments not to let tight budgets roll back progress against the epidemic at a critical turning point.

The conference's goal is to turn the tide on HIV. Experts say science has provided tools to finally stem the spread of the intractable virus.

Dr. Diane Havlir of UCSF, a co-chair of the conference, said it would be "an extraordinary failure of global will and conscience" if financial cutbacks block this chance.

International AIDS Society President Dr. Elly Katabira urged the more than 20,000 scientists, policymakers and people with HIV at the meeting to "resolve together to never go backward."

Demonstrators marched through downtown Washington on Sunday to urge the public and policymakers to pay attention to a disease that, in this country, doesn't get much publicity anymore.

"We're everyday people. Anybody and everybody can catch this," said Ann Dixon, who traveled from Arkansas to attend the march. She learned she had HIV in 1997.

The AIDS conference - remarkable for giving a forum not just to leading scientists, but to ordinary people who live with HIV - hasn't returned to the United States since 1990, in protest of the longtime ban on people with the virus entering the country. The Obama administration lifted the travel ban in 2010, finishing a process begun under the Bush administration. Not lifted was a ban on sex workers and injecting drug users, and protesters briefly interrupted the opening news conference to decry their absence from the meeting.

The conference comes at a time when scientists increasingly say they have powerful new tools to add to tried-and-true condoms.

Studies show treatment as prevention - treating HIV right away rather than after someone is sick - lowers patients' chances of spreading the virus through sex by a stunning 96 percent. A leading U.S. AIDS researcher, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said regions that are pushing to get more people tested and rushed into treatment are already starting to see infections drop, from San Francisco to part of South Africa.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration just approved use of a daily AIDS medicine, Truvada, for use by healthy people hoping to lower the risk of infection by a sexual partner. Hard-hit poor countries are grappling with how to get that protection to their highest-risk populations.

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