The International Aids conference - this year in Vienna - is never a tame affair. With 20,000 impassioned, often angry, always highly motivated delegates, that would be unlikely. The emotion and the rhetoric of what is essentially a political rather than a scientific conference (for all that it is organised by doctors) has had real and dramatic knock-on effects in the past.
In Durban, South Africa, in 2000, the conference shamed drug companies and rich nations into providing drug treatment to keep the millions alive who were dying of AIDSin poor countries.
There has been copious blood on the floor - red paint, to be honest, all over the stands of the drug companies who used to be regularly targeted by activists for their high prices for AIDS drugs. But this year, the focus for much of the anger is more unexpected - President Obama, of whom so much has been expected by so many.
The key complaint is that Obama, before he was elected, promised US$50 billion more for AIDS by 2013. Now he has backtracked, activists say. But no - his defenders riposte, he is absolutely committed to fighting HIV and AIDS, which will get a 2.5 per cent increase in 2011 in spite of the dire economic climate. Bill Clinton defended him from the platform. Eric Goosby, who heads PEPFAR, the President's emergency plan for AIDS relief, said Obama had been misunderstood and was hurt by it. Zeke Emanuel, special advisor on health to the White House Office of Management and Budget, was bullish in his rejection of the activists' claims of cuts.
Well they would say that, wouldn't they. More alarming to my mind is that this controversy stirred up divisions between people who should be on the same side. Médecins Sans Frontières, together with Health Gap and AIDS Free World, laid into the American president. Oxfam America, meanwhile, produced a breathless defence of the administration.
more on http://www.ippf.org/
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