HEALTH: A New Inclusive Community for AIDS to Be Born?

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jul 10 2004 (IPS) - When the 15th International AIDS Conference (IAC) begins here Sunday, this biennial event will lay the foundations for a new relationship between people living with HIV, grassroots groups and the scientific community.

The space provided at the Bangkok conference for people infected with the killer disease and community groups is unprecedented in the 19-year history of the IAC.

This move by the organisers will affirm a breakthrough during the 13th IAC held in Durban, in 2000. At that South African event, the conference doors were opened for the first time to enable people with HIV and activists engage with the participants from the scientific community.

Another significant parallel between the South African conference and the one in Thailand, which runs from Jul. 11-16, is that it will mark the second time that an IAC will be held in a developing country afflicted with AIDS.

Here again, Durban was a milestone that is being cemented by Bangkok playing host to this premier global conference on AIDS with the killer disease providing a poignant backdrop.

AIDS activists are hoping that this will strengthen the case for future IACs to be held in countries where it will have the maximum impact on nations under siege from HIV.

According to a U.N. report released this week, a person infected with HIV dies every 10 minutes in Thailand. This South-east Asian country has over 600,000 people living with the disease out of a population of 63 million people.

Sub-Saharan Africa, however, remains the worst hit. It is home to 25 million of the estimated 38 million people living with HIV. Of that number, 5.3 million live in South Africa.

To symbolise the unprecedented scale of community participation expected at the IAC, a ‘Global Village’ has been created at the Bangkok conference site – an open venue where people living with HIV and those championing their cause from around the world will be able to mingle and share stories.

This venue will also enable non-delegates to interact with the conference participants, a feature that the body spearheading the biennial conferences, the Stockholm-based International AIDS Society (IAS), has endorsed for the first time.

In addition, the issues to be discussed within the conference halls will also mark a departure from the traditionally weighty themes about scientific and medical breakthroughs that have been the main thrust of these conferences since they began in the U.S. city of Atlanta, in 1985.

”Half of the lectures will be on the non-scientific side,” Mechai Viravaidiya, a member of Thailand’s Senate and co-chair of the community programme at the IAC, told IPS.

This will drive home the message that AIDS cannot be perceived as a problem to be tackled by medical researchers without community participation, he added. ”The need for prevention makes this case. This is where the voice of the community first matters.”

On the eve of the conference – due to attract some 15,000 participants, -grassroots groups and AIDS activists have singled out key areas they were hoping to champion to help the people living with HIV.

They include the world’s poor – infected with the disease – having a right to treatment, the availability of cheap anti-retroviral drugs and the easy availability of condoms to prevent HIV from spreading.

U.S. Aids activist Sharonann Lynch welcomed the space being conceded by the IAS for a greater grassroots presence at the conference.

They have finally woken up to the principle that ”people living with HIV/AIDS must be involved in shaping the policies that affect them but also involved in their own treatment education,” Lynch, of Health Global Access Project, a New York-based health rights lobby, told IPS.

”Without community participation you are not going to make the science relevant to the people in need of the technologies,” she added. ”Right now the science is not heeding the on the ground reality in resource-poor settings.”

Even officials of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) are endorsing the AIDS conference’s broadened agenda, consequently shedding the image these conferences had till Durban of scientists working in isolation to combat HIV.

”You got to have a partnership between researchers and the community. You cannot divorce one from the other,” Tony Lisle, head of the UNAIDS South-east Asia and Pacific division, said in an interview.

It is also healthy to have such community participation because ”the scientific community has to be held accountable for their work,” he added.

But not everyone is cheering these changes within the biennial conference.

Joep Lange, president of the IAS and co-chair of the conference, admitted during an interview that some scientists are accusing the IAS of ”selling out to the community activists.”

He conceded, though, that the change was inevitable given pace at which HIV was evolving. ”I think the conference has moved with the epidemic and with the development of HIV/AIDS.”

Today scientists are dealing with a different situation regards AIDS than in the 1980s, he added. ”We now can treat this infection and we must talk about implementation, so it becomes a broader issue, a different constituency.”

And that sense has been captured by the issues that will be addressed during the IAC.

They include the emerging debate between free distribution of condoms as opposed to abstinence to prevent the spread of HIV, the clash between science and religious ideology to shape HIV/AIDS programmes and the push by pharmaceutical companies to protect the patents of their expensive anti-AIDS drugs.

This will be a ”conference of accountability,” he said. ”We need to be critical at this conference” about the direction in which policies about HIV/AIDS are taking.