This year I had the opportunity to attend the 17th International AIDS Conference, which ran from the 3rd – 8th August in Mexico City. I was brought to tears early on in the conference, when a young 13 year old girl from Honduras, who has been living with HIV since she was born, described her desire to live a normal life without discrimination. A life where her blossoming sexuality was uncomplicated and she could pursue her life time dreams of being a singer.
The conference itself was on a vast scale. On any given day there were 46 concurrent sessions, 20 skills building sessions, 36 program activities and 26 satellite sessions. Fortunately many of the sessions were recorded and are down loadable from the web at www.aids2008.org.
One of the important themes from the conference was recognition that men who have sex with men and the homophobia they experience in their everyday lives is significantly contributing to rates of HIV infection around the world. Resources are often misdirected to generalised prevention, which is not appropriate when the epidemiology of country or region specific infection rates are analysed.
For people living with HIV some focus areas included ‘pos in prevention’, treatment support and care, reproductive sexual health and criminalisation of HIV. A consensus statement made by the Swiss AIDS Commission was discussed. The Swiss statement, as it is known, was that people with HIV who have an undetectable viral load for at least 6 months and maintain effective treatments (this means undetectable viral load) and are free from any other STI, pose a negligible risk to their monogamous negative partner should they choose, in an informed and consensual way, not use condoms. Although at first glance there may be some individual couples who could benefit, on further analysis a small migration from condoms and a safe sex culture on a population level could have a devastating negative consequence to our community because of hidden HIV infections embedded within our communities.
I am most grateful to be a person living with HIV in Australia. In our country we have existing anti-discrimination laws and universal access to health care. I wanted to personally say thank you. Australia is a place where I can predominantly be myself and pursue my dreams. Comparatively speaking in world terms we are up there amongst the best. For people living with HIV interested in learning more of what happened at Mexico, the annual treatments forum will be held on September 11th 2008. Please contact me at WAAC 94820000 (or email cmartinez@waaids.com) for further details or register your interest on-line on www.waaids.com.
