Consumer Safety & Drug Resistance To Be Explored at International Conference on AIDS

July 9, 2004

Consumer Safety & Drug Resistance To Be Explored at
International Conference on AIDS

In Bangkok, AIDS Action to convene government, science, faith-based, and community leaders from the U.S. and Africa for satellite session

(Washington, DC) With a cure and therapeutic vaccine years if not decades away, antiretroviral (ARV) medications are an essential means for keeping HIV positive people alive and healthy. Yet, according to the World Health Organization, nine out of ten people in need of ARVs are not being reached. Recognizing this crisis, the U.S. government, foreign governments, and health organizations around the world have committed to making ARV therapy more widely available. However, providing ARV therapy to the millions in need and ensuring Access for All, the International AIDS conference’s central theme, presents complex challenges that must be carefully assessed and overcome. Two issues of particular concern in such a scale-up are consumer safety and drug resistance.

In the July 13 satellite session, New Thoughts, New Theories, New Technologies: Consumer Safety and Issues of Drug Resistance, AIDS Action will bring together a highly esteemed panel of experts from the United States, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania to discuss these concerns as well as other emerging issues in the provision of HIV treatment in under-resourced countries.

While much focus is currently directed toward the treatment needs of developing countries, which account for a disproportionately high number of the world’s HIV cases, the treatment crisis also extends to the United States, especially in under-resourced communities. By CDC estimates, there are half a million HIV positive people in the U.S who are not in care and thus not receiving antiretroviral therapy.

“While the U.S. assists in efforts to increase ARV availability abroad, it must also increase access to treatment for people at home,” stated AIDS Action’s Executive Director Marsha Martin, DSW, a co-host of the session. “As the U.S. takes on this dual challenge, we must not only be quick in our policy development, we must be thorough as well. U.S. policy on HIV treatment, both global and domestic, should be the safest and most effective the world has to offer.”

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22222 Consumer Safety & Drug Resistance To Be Explored at International Conference on AIDS

The satellite session, also co-hosted by AIDS Action Council’s Board Chair Craig Thompson and Public Policy Committee Co-chair Linda Frank, PhD will be held from 8:15 to 10:15 p.m., Bangkok time, in Session Room F in the IMPACT Convention Center. It will include the following participants:

Christopher Bates, Acting Director, Office of HIV/AIDS Policy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Mark Dybul, Deputy Chief Medical Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, U.S. Department of State
Farley Cleghorn, MD, Director of the Center for HIV/AIDS, The Futures Group International
Bruce Gilliam, MD, Division of Clinical Care and Research, The Institute of Human Virology, University of Maryland
Pernessa C. Seele, Founder/CEO, The Balm In Gilead
Reverend Evatt Mugarura, Uganda
Nguru Karugu, Kenya
Dr. Alban Hokororo, Tanzania

While in Bangkok, AIDS Action will further contribute to the theme Access for All by putting the workbook Connecting to Care: Addressing Unmet Need in HIV into the hands of conference participants. This new publication offers a fresh glimpse of how communities in the U.S. have expanded access to HIV care.

AIDS Action Foundation strives to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by working for public policies that promote prevention against new infections, provide care for people already living with HIV/AIDS, and support the search for a cure. AIDS Action is the national voice of all people living with HIV, representing community based organizations across the country.