conference

Of men and monkeys

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(This post appeared on Nature Medicine’s Spoonful of Medicine blog on March 30, 2007. You can see the original post here.)

Sooty mangabey

I realize that my previous blog entry makes it sound as if HIV researchers are a complaining and bitter bunch. Far from it. They do complain, but they are also one of the friendliest and most unpretentious group of researchers anywhere. They can go from discussing how quickly HIV can wipe out the immune system to the latest in footwear and eyewear in a flash.

Last night was the finale of the HIV meeting — and may I just say, these scientists also know how to party.

Earlier in the week, bigwig HIV researcher Bruce Walker hosted his annual keystone bash. Here are a few things that should tell you it was a great party: there was much spilled drink; people sang Happy Birthday to Philip Goulder at midnight (it really was his birthday); everyone with a camera or cellphone snapped incriminating pictures of everyone else; one noted scientist was so falling down drunk that he really did fall down and had to be escorted home; and the police came — twice.

Last night’s was almost a repeat performance, but the police didn’t make an appearance — not that I know of anyway. In between their drunken revelry, these scientists also managed to put on one of the most interesting conferences I’ve ever been to. As per keystone rules, I can’t really write about the specifics, but among the topics I found most interesting were those that delved into why sooty mangabey monkeys infected with SIV, the monkey version of HIV, never progress to a disease like AIDS and on elite controllers, a group of people who, despite being infected with HIV for more than a decade, have undetectable levels of the virus in their blood.

Figuring out what protects the monkeys or the elite controllers could be the key to a good vaccine. And this week’s talks made me feel optimistic that at some point in my lifetime, even if not in the next 15 or 20 years, we’ll know the answer.

SfN: Drop in numbers

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(This post originally appeared on Nature’s news blog. It’s now part of the “In the field” conference blog.)

The Dalai Lama was a big draw at last year’s conference.

There are 25,651 people at the Society for Neuroscience conference this year. Sounds like a lot. But it’s actually a solid drop from last year’s 35,000 attendees—and it shows.

The normally overflowing conference halls are emptier. The lines at the food stalls are a bit shorter. Even in the press room, there are fewer journalists banging away at their keyboards.

Why? Last November’s meeting in Washington DC “was in a different location, it was a different time of year, and the Dalai Lama was a big draw. You can’t discount that,” says Joe Carey, the society’s senior director of communications.

A whopping 14,000 people listened to the Dalai Lama, who last year inaugurated the special Science & Society series. This year’s speaker, architect Frank Gehry, attracted considerably fewer people. And Atlanta is no match for the attractions of San Diego or New Orleans, where past meetings were held.

But that’s not the whole story. Judging by the most common refrain in the hallways here, the real reason is obvious: money. The NIH pay line just dropped to an abysmal 7% and most scientists simply can’t afford to be here.

The average age for someone to win their first independent grant is now 44, prompting the society’s president to announce rather dramatically (at the press breakfast on Sunday), “If the young people don’t get the grants, all of us will get old and there’ll be no science.” Still, the 25,651 here does include a lot of young grad students and postdocs.

SfN: Location, location, location

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(This post originally appeared on Nature’s news blog. It’s now part of the “In the field” conference blog.)

Atlanta was never the first choice. The SFN annual meeting has met in New Orleans every three years, and 2006 was again New Orleans’ turn after San Diego and Washington DC.

But then, Katrina struck, and the society decided last year to move the 2006 meeting to Atlanta. Fair enough.

But the society won’t be returning to New Orleans any time soon, instead meeting in November 2009 in Chicago. Weather considerations aside (they don’t call Chicago the Windy City for nothing), some say the society has rashly abandoned New Orleans just when it needs the economic boost large conferences can bring.

A few enterprising young scientists here took matters into their own hands and began handing out stickers saying “New Orleans for 2009”, which they urged attendees to affix to their badges. Sadly, they don’t seem to have made much headway. Few attendees have seen them and even fewer are wearing the stickers. Looks like it will be blues, not jazz, in 2009 after all.

Heroin boom fuels AIDS epidemic

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(I wrote this article for Nature from the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto. It appeared on Nature’s site on August 15, 2006.)

Sharing of needles accounts for a large amount of HIV transmission outside of Africa.

The flourishing drug trade in Afghanistan is fuelling the AIDS epidemic in that country and its neighbours in Asia, warns a World Bank report released at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, this week.

More than 7.4 million people in South and Southeast Asia are infected with HIV, but the epidemic is vastly variable across the region. In many parts of India — which, with 5.7 million cases has more people living with HIV than any other country in the world — infections are driven by commercial sex work.

But in the predominantly Muslim countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, limited data suggest that HIV is primarily a problem among injecting drug users. More widely, drug users sharing infected needles is now thought to be responsible for nearly one in three new cases outside Africa.

Drug-injecting commercial sex workers could spread the epidemic into
 the general population, warns Julian Schweitzer, director for human
 development in the World Bank’s South Asia regional team. “This should be a cause of great concern for all the countries in that region,” he says.

Heroin capital

Afghanistan had negligible rates of HIV/AIDS until 2000. But since then, prolonged war and civil unrest have boosted drug use, says David Wilson, co-author of the report. The country has reclaimed its historical role as the world’s largest producer and exporter of heroin.

Afghanistan is estimated to have more than 900,000 illicit drug users, including 120,000 women and 60,000 children. Afghanis have traditionally smoked opium, but refugees living in Pakistan and Iran began injecting heroin. Of some 50,000 heroin users in Afghanistan, a negligible number of women but about 15% of male users are thought to inject the drug.

As a result, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS among injecting drug users in Afghanistan is now 4%.

The increased drug traffic from Afghanistan is likely to have an impact on nearby countries already struggling with HIV. In Pakistan, about 25% of injecting drug users are thought to be infected.

The Afghan government is negotiating with the World Bank to fund programmes for injecting drug users, to help people come off the drug or to use clean needles. The World Bank is also conducting a larger surveillance study, results of which are expected in 6 months.

References:

World Bank report- AIDS in South Asia: understanding and responding. (2006).

 

AIDS care ignores children

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(This article was published on Nature’s news site on 13 July, 2004. I reported this from the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok.)

Companies fail to design drugs for kids.

Around 700,000 children were infected with HIV in
2003.

Bangkok – The global fight against AIDS is not addressing children, the very group that is hit hardest by the pandemic, says the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

In recent years, there has been considerable progress in developing diagnostic tests and anti-AIDS drugs for adults. But doctors lack the simple tools needed to diagnose and treat children infected with the virus.

“Children are a discriminated minority, they are a marginalized community,” David Wilson, medical coordinator of MSF in Thailand told the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok.

In 2003, an estimated 700,000 children under the age of 15 were newly infected with HIV. Most of these live in sub-Saharan Africa.

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AIDS epidemic set to escalate in Asia

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(I reported this article for Nature from the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok. It appeared on Nature’s news site on July 12, 2004.)

Leaders urged to take immediate action.

Around 7.4 million people in Asia are already living with HIV.

Bangkok – A massive AIDS epidemic is spreading rapidly in Asia, and is sneaking below the radar of governments in the region, experts warned on 11 July.

Speaking at the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, scientists urged Asian governments to scale up prevention and treatment efforts by providing sterile needles, condoms and antiretroviral drugs.

“This conference must be a wake-up call to Asian leaders,” says Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. “They’re starting to respond, but sometimes too timidly.”

An estimated 7.4 million people in Asia are already living with HIV. Unlike in Africa, where the disease has spread into the general population, the Asian epidemic is driven largely by intravenous drug users, sex workers and men who have sex with men, according to a
new report released by the network known as Monitoring the AIDS Pandemic (MAP).

“That pattern has held in virtually every country in Asia,” says Tim Brown, an epidemiologist at the East-West Center research organization in Bangkok, and a member of the MAP network.

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