The first IAS conference to highlight biomedical prevention was held in Sydney in July 2007
Over 5000 delegates from 133 countries met in Sydney in July for the 4th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention, the first major international conference on the biomedical aspects of AIDS to be held in Australia. It was also the first conference in this series to include prevention in its title and to assign a central role to prevention research in the scientific program, alongside basic science and clinical research. Coinciding with the conference was the release of the Sydney Declaration, which calls for 10% of all resources devoted to HIV programming to be dedicated to research1 (Box). The conference provided Australia with an opportunity to benefit from the presence of world-leading scientists from a number of disciplines, as well as to showcase outstanding Australian achievements in HIV research.
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- 1. International AIDS Society. The Sydney Declaration: good research drives good policy and programming. A call to scale up research. Sydney: IAS, 2007. http://www.iasociety.org/Default.aspx?pageId=63 (accessed Aug 2007).
- 2. 4th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention; 2007 Jul 22-25; Sydney, Australia. Programme at a glance. http://www.ias2007.org/pag/PAG.aspx (accessed Oct 2007).
- 3. Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents. Guidelines for the use of antiretroviral agents in HIV-1-infected adults and adolescents. Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council, Oct 2006. http://www.ashm.org.au/aust-guidelines/ (accessed Oct 2007).
- 4. Strategies for Management of Antiretroviral Therapy (SMART) Study Group, El-Sadr WM, Lundgren JD, et al. CD4+ count-guided interruption of antiretroviral treatment. N Engl J Med 2006; 355: 2283-2296.
Lisa Maher and John Kaldor are principal investigators on the male tolerance study of Vivagel (a candidate vaginal microbicide) mentioned in the article (abstract TUAC1LB); this was funded by a National Institutes of Health contract awarded to Starpharma. Iona Millwood is a researcher employed by the University of New South Wales, Sydney, on this study.