Transcript of WHO podcast - 27 August 2008

The XVII International AIDS Conference which was held in Mexico City in early August was truly an international event with participants from every corner of the world. With over 20 000 participants, this meeting was the second largest International AIDS Conference, and the largest health-related summit ever held in the southern hemisphere.

Veronica Riemer: You’re listening to the WHO podcast. My name is Veronica Riemer and this is episode 43.

In this episode, we follow-up on the International Aids Conference which was held in Mexico City in early August. We talk to two people who attended the event: Andrew Ball, a Medical Officer from the WHO HIV/AIDS Department and Mark Harrington, Executive Director of the Treatment Action Group.

Story

The XVII International AIDS conference was truly an international event with participants from every corner of the world. With over 20 000 participants, this meeting was the second largest International AIDS Conference, and the largest health-related summit ever held in the southern hemisphere. Dr Andrew Ball came into the studio to talk about WHO's role.

Dr Andrew Ball: The conference consists of 3 separate meetings. There is a scientific meeting, which has been the traditional part of the conference, which attracts all the scientists, clinicians, a lot of the policy makers but more recently they have added other components. There is a component on leadership. Asssociated with the leadership portion of the conference there was also a meeting of health ministers and education ministers. There was also a meeting of first ladies and women leaders from Latin America.

The third part of the conference is that of the community, and this is a very special part of the conference. The conference venue has what is known as a global village which provides an opportunity for civil society, non-governmental organizations and for the general public to come and learn about HIV and to participate in a broad range of events.

WHO's involvement in the conference was in all three components. We were involved in around about 20 satellite meetings and contributed to about 100 presentations during the conference ranging from treatment scale-up through to HIV and nutrition, TB and HIV, health systems financing through to interventions for most at risk populations such as drug users.

Veronica Riemer: Do you think the location of the conference influenced the discussions?

Dr Andrew Ball: The particular focus of the conference was on issues that were most relevant to the Latin American situation. In Latin America the epidemic tends to be concentrated amongst most at-risk populations such as injected drug users, sex workers, men who have sex with men and prisoners. Therefore we heard a lot about programmes that were specifically targeting these populations. We also learned that the health sector plays an important role in delivering services for these particularly vulnerable and affected populations.

Veronica Riemer: We spoke to Mark Harrington, Executive Director of the Treatment Action Group (TAG),which advocates for responsible public policy on AIDS research and treatment and pushes for more funding for AIDS research.

Mark Harrington: 2008 was the first time at a conference that the United Nations had been able to report that there were probable declines in HIV mortality, and that the increases in HIV infections had begun to level out and possibly even to drop over the past few years, and that this might be in part due to the interventions that the global community has begun to implement to fight the epidemic.

Veronica Riemer: What were the most important discussions at the conference?

Mark Harrington: I think the most important discussions at the conference were those that were relating to the global scale-up towards the goal of universal access by 2010. So a lot of different countries were there with different presentations that were about what that country was doing, how the results were and what was happening medically to people and what was happening in treatment and what was happening in prevention. I think the most dramatic changes in the last four years have been that we now have about 3 million people all over the world receiving anti-HIV drugs and this means that millions of lives are now being saved by HIV treatment programmes. A lot of the talk is now about how prevention programmes can catch up and can capitalise on the success of treatment now to do a better job on prevention which has been lagging.

Veronica Riemer: For in depth coverage on the conference or to learn more about WHO's work on HIV/AIDS, visit www.who.int/hiv.

That's all for this episode of the WHO podcast. Thanks for listening. If you have any comments on our podcast or have any suggestions for future health topics drop us a line. Our email address is Podcast@who.int.

For the World Health Organization, this is Veronica Riemer in Geneva.