icon- folder.gif   Conference Reports for NATAP  
 
  4th IAS (Intl AIDS Society) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention
Sydney, Australia
22-25 July 2007
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HIV/AIDS conference opens in Sydney
 
 
  Jul 23, 2007
http://tvnz.co.nz
 
(Note from jules: there were several oral sessions today and a poster session with several interesting posters. There were oral sessions today on : HIV pathogemesis, Should We Have A When To start HAART Study, in the HIV and Aging session talk Brian Gazzard said HIV+ individuals experience accelerated aging and declining immune systems. The big oral sessions are tomorrow and Wednesday where new data will be presented, the big stories: 48-week naive data on Raltegravir, Merck integrase; 48-week naive data on CCR5 Maraviroc; TITAN Study: Kaletra vs TMC114 in earlier patient population, DUET 1 & 2, these Tibotec studies were published in The Lancet just before this conference, but orals will provide some additional information. An interesting topic for scuttle-but in the halls between meetings is will docs start to use raltegravir firstline or wait, and how quickly will it be taken up as use in firstline. Abbott has met with activists and decided to drop the lawsuit, hopefully Abbott and activists can make progress. There was a very interesting poster from Switzerland where 22 discordant couples took tenofovir PreP twice and then had unprotected sex to get pregnant. Male partners had been on HAART & <50 c/ml for 3 months. All female partners were tested HIV negative 3 months after the last unprotected intercourse. More than 70% of women became pregnant after up to 3 episodes of unprotected intercourse. This was pilot study that needs further evaluation!!!)
 
The world's biggest scientific HIV/AIDS conference has opened in Australia with experts calling for more funding for research and new findings which suggest male circumcision can reduce infection by 60%.
 
About 5,000 delegates from more than 130 countries are attending the conference in Sydney this week to hear from the world's top experts in the fight against the global pandemic.
 
Delegates will be shown evidence from trials in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa that circumcision can reduce the risk of HIV infection in heterosexual men by about 60%.
 
The trials confirmed previous studies which have reported circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection. Muslim and Jewish men are circumcised in accordance with religious beliefs.
 
A briefing note said male circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa would prevent 5.7 million new cases of HIV infection and three million deaths over 20 years.
 
The conference also issued a declaration urging governments to allocate 10% of all resources for HIV into research.
 
"Science has given us the tools to prevent and treat HIV effectively. The fact that we have not yet translated this science into practice is a shameful failure," Pedro Cahn. the president of the International Aids Society told reporters on Sunday.
 
Global AIDS treatment is expected to fall far short of a universal target to have five million people being treated by 2010, due to a continued lack of access to drugs by many of the world's impoverished people.
 
The United Nations says close to 40 million people are infected with the AIDS virus and that treatment had dramatically expanded from 240,000 people in 2001 to 1.3 million by 2005.
 
In June, world powers at the Group of Eight (G8) summit in Germany set a target of providing AIDS drugs over the next few years to approximately five million people. Anthony Facui, who advises the White House on the virus, said the message at the conference would be mixed as a lot had been accomplished but there was still a lot to do.
 
"We still now are only treating 28% of the people who actually need therapy. We cannot sustain a successful effort without prevention," Fauci, who estimated 60 million people would be infected by 2015, told reporters.