Last month’s International AIDS Conference featured a host of big-name speakers — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, singer and activist Elton John — but it was also the stories of activists, advocates and researchers that left attendees with hope that an end to the epidemic could one day be a reality.
The conference, the first to be held in the United States in more than two decades, drew about 25,000 people to discuss the latest developments in HIV/AIDS research, prevention and policies.
Among the news coming out of the conference was Timothy Ray Brown’s announcement that he has launched a foundation whose mission will solely be to work for a cure for HIV/AIDS.
Brown is considered the first person to be cured of HIV, following a bone-marrow transplant for leukemia. A new report presented at the conference detailed that other men from Boston who underwent the same procedure have now presented with similar results.
“Words cannot begin to express my joy that two other men may have been cured of HIV,” Brown said. “This reinforces my determination and belief that we must fulfill my foundation’s central mission of investing in cutting-edge therapies and treatment to advance AIDS cure research.”
Katie Krauss, executive director of AIDS Policy Project, said her agency has also dedicated itself to working for a cure.
“The future is looking really bright for people who want a cure for AIDS,” Krauss said. “Research is going really well, and there are really interesting new developments. There’s exciting work being done in gene therapy and with regular AIDS drugs that could lead to a cure; every area of cure research is going very well right now, and it’s a very exciting time be a cure activist.”
Juliet Fink, director of education at Philadelphia FIGHT, said the conference explored an array of tracks that support “getting to zero,” creating a generation that is HIV-free.
“There are so many exciting, new ways we can foresee an end to the epidemic, including research for a cure,” she said. “There was also a lot of promising information coming out around vaccine research. And there are scalable things that people are interested in doing worldwide that would have a dramatic impact on the epidemic, such as treatment as prevention — treating as many people as possible to prevent the spread of HIV.”
Political will and funding are integral to get there, Fink said.
A firm investment from the activist community is also essential, said Krauss.
“We need the science and we need the push,” she said. “Without the push, there’s no funding and no prestige. Without the prestige, it’s difficult to get funding, difficult to get articles into journals. Issues like this need prestige and funding, and that’s where activism comes in.”
Activism was on display at the We Can End AIDS mobilization last Tuesday, in which thousands marched to the White House to demand support for needle-exchange programs, decriminalization of sex workers, Wall Street taxes and other actions to generate funds for HIV/AIDS causes.
“That was really the highlight of my time in D.C., getting to see our strength in numbers,” Fink said.
Krauss said the full impact of the action has yet to be realized.
“Sometimes people wonder what the point is of demonstrations. It’s a moment where an important issue can break through into the public consciousness,” she said. “Every legislator who picked up the Washington Post saw it; all decision-makers saw it; President Obama, even though he wasn’t there and he should have been, saw it because we were at the White House. It was powerful. These demonstrations are hard to say no to and have made a big difference in the past few years. They send a very loud message to global funders about what they are going to be able to get away with.”