BALTIMORE, Md.--While the HIV virus continues to attack without discrimination, the whole world shares a moral imperative to help places hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic.
That clear "take home message" from AIDS-fighting leaders of Africa and the Carribean to top U.S. and European AIDS research scientists meeting in Baltimore, was a call for more "North-South"scientific partnerships, said University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) scientist William Blattner. "They gave us an unvarnished view of their complex experiences dealing with the hard realities of the epidemic in the developing world."
The unusual "HIV/AIDS in the Developing World" session was the first of its kind for the annual conference of UMBI's Institute of Human Virology (IHV), which dates back more than 20 years when director Robert C. Gallo, Blattner and other IHV scientists conducted AIDS and other research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
The IHV conference was attended by nearly 800 scientists earlier this month. For six days, most of the 130 HIV and cancer research speakers presented details of experimental AIDS vaccines, genetics of ever-more subtypes of mutating HIV strains, advances in treatments, and sobering statistics of a still ravaging world epidemic of nearly 40 million people infected. However this year, Blattner organized the developing world session as a follow up to the "message," he said, of the World AIDS Conference held in Durban, South Africa earlier this year. "One of the things that came out of Durban is that AIDS, unlike any other major disease, affects every country. We set this up at a high-end science meeting as a real opportunity for scientists to take to heart the immediacy of their research to those whose lives depend upon affordable therapies and an effective preventative vaccine," said Blattner. He is a veteran AIDS epidemiologist who with NCI in the mid-1980's helped define HIV transmission routes in the population.
However, speakers from the developing nations warned that scientific "interventions"--such as the AIDS vaccines entering clinical trials in several nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the reduction in costs of anti-HIV drug therapies--although promising, are not clear cut answers in all the hot spots of the epidemic.
For full story of the discussion of AIDS scientists and leaders fighting AIDS in the Third World: www.umbi.umd.edu.