AIDS conference with 25,000 participants set to begin in Mexico

Aug 3, 2008, 19:52 GMT

Mexico City - The issues of homophobia and disappointments in the search for an elusive vaccine were expected to dominate the 17th International AIDS Conference after it opens later Sunday in Mexico City.

An estimated 25,000 scientists, politicians, physicians and activists will be on hand for the first AIDS conference in Latin America since the epidemic began in the 1980s. The gathering, expected to be the largest to date for the biennial conference, will end on Friday.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was to be on hand for the opening on Sunday.

Already on Saturday, thousands of people rallied through the streets of Mexico City against homophobia. Men who have sex with men represent a quarter of the new infections in Latin America.

Jorge Saavedra Lopez, the director general of Mexico's National Centre for Prevention and Control of HIV/AIDS (CENSIDA), and the country's first openly-gay person to serve as a senior government official, has been directly involved in the fight to reduce discrimination against homosexuals.

'It is difficult to evaluate the extent of homophobia in our country,' Saavedra said recently.

Saavedra, who founded the country's first ambulatory care clinic for AIDS in 2000, will be addressing the conference and the topic of homophobia during the week.

On the question of vaccine, the world AIDS community received sobering news in the past weeks that the giant US public research programme was pulling the plug on testing of a vaccine that had raised hopes at the conference two years ago in Toronto, Canada.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Seth Berkley, president of the New York-based International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), and other leading world researchers will be meeting and speaking at the conference.

Some AIDS activists have called for the estimated annual 700 million dollars spent on research to be channeled into providing more of the effective antiretroviral drug therapy for disadvantaged populations such as those in Africa.

On Friday, the health ministers of Latin America committed to a programme of expanded sex education for young people about preventive measures against spread of HIV.

   More than a quarter of a century since AIDS was first identified, 25 million people have died and an estimated 33.2 million people are currently living with HIV/AIDS.