‘Forgotten epidemic’: World’s largest HIV/AIDS conference to draw thousands to Montreal


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“Community engagement makes science better and uptake results better. We learned that from HIV.”

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July 27, 2022 • 57 minutes ago • 7 minutes read • Join the conversation “Following the discovery of the COVID-19 vaccine, we are closer than ever to an effective HIV vaccine and until and all on the way to a cure,” said Dr. Jean. -Pierre Routy, co-president of the 24th International AIDS Conference. Photo by Allen McInnis /Montreal Gazette

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Say “pandemic” and most people think of COVID-19. Yet HIV, which claims one life every minute, remains the deadliest pandemic of our time.

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According to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), an estimated 79 million people have been infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. There is still no vaccine or cure, although 28 million of the 38 million people living with HIV are currently on life-saving antiretroviral therapy that keeps them well by reducing the amount of virus in their bodies and preventing transmission. That means 10 million people are not.

HIV infections are increasing in many countries and progress against new infections has slowed in others. More than four decades after AIDS was first reported in 1981, “we live in a world where HIV is the forgotten epidemic,” says the program describing the opening session of the world’s largest international meeting world focused on HIV/AIDS, the 24th International AIDS Conference. . The five-day meeting begins Friday in Montreal.

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This first AIDS 2022 session, as the conference is known, will explore the “growing apathy” about HIV and consider “why and how the world must re-engage and follow science” if the virus is to be overcome .

AIDS 2022, Montreal’s largest conference this year, will have a hybrid format: it will bring 7,200 delegates in person to the Convention Center — masks are required — and another 800 people will participate virtually through an interactive platform. COVID-19 meant that the 2020 edition of the biennial conference was entirely virtual.

As HIV researchers and scientists turned to develop vaccines and treatments for COVID-19, the speed with which they understood the coronavirus was directly related to their HIV research, said Dr. Marina Klein, professor from the department of medicine at McGill University. director of the Chronic Viral Disease Service at the McGill University Health Center and lecturer.

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And the HIV research community will “bring lessons from the work on COVID-19 to the HIV field,” he said. “This may have particular benefits for developing an HIV vaccine that has so far, despite decades of research, been elusive.”

Human clinical trials began this year for an experimental HIV vaccine developed by Moderna and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. It uses the same mRNA technology as Moderna’s successful COVID-19 vaccine to generate an immune response.

“Following the discovery of the COVID-19 vaccine, we are closer than ever to an effective HIV vaccine and even on the way to a cure,” said Dr. Jean-Pierre Routy, co-president of AIDS 2022, clinical director of Chronic Viral Disease. Service to the MUHC, Louis Lowenstein Chair in Hematology and Oncology and Senior Scientist at the MUHC Research Institute and Professor of Medicine at McGill. “If it works for one disease, it should work for another.”

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But it’s important to refocus attention on HIV, said Routy, who is also co-director of the Immunotherapy and Vaccines Core of the Canadian HIV Trials Network at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

As resources have been redirected to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of HIV testing and treatment have declined, access to treatment and prevention services and health personnel have been restricted, and community organizations that help people living with HIV are depleted, Klein said. , national co-director of the CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network. Without a concerted effort to scale up interventions quickly, “we are very concerned that the progress that is being made will be significantly affected,” he said.

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In 1989, when the international AIDS meeting took place in Montreal for the first time, protesters from community groups and activists took the stage and disrupted the opening ceremony. This mobilization “started a transformation of the relationship between medicine and society,” said Montreal Pride executive director Simon Gamache. “Patients’ voices could no longer be ignored by scientists.”

That meeting led to “engaging the community, people living with HIV as a partner in the fight,” Routy said, and now the conference is “a true partnership” between science and the community.

On Thursday, a one-day pre-conference will bring together scientists and people living with HIV at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal.

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In a prelude to Montreal Pride, which begins on August 1 and overlaps with AIDS 2022, the festival will feature cultural events such as Rapture, a choreographic work designed as a tribute to people who have died of AIDS. The play “combines commemoration, grief and resilience and aims to remind us of the remarkable advances of the past decades,” Gamache said.

“One of the great lessons of HIV is the importance of community engagement and community participation,” said Dr. Catherine Hankins, professor of population and public health at McGill, co-chair of the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force at the Canada and conference participant. “It’s not just a supplement to science. It makes science better when there’s co-creation of studies and joint oversight of studies.”

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In 2004, two pre-exposure HIV prevention trials in sex workers in Cambodia and Cameroon were closed because of inadequate community participation, “and we realized that this would affect all prevention trials “said Hankins, Chief Scientific Adviser at UNAIDS in Geneva. from 2002 to 2012.

He called a meeting and invited representatives from ACT UP, an international grassroots political group working to end the AIDS pandemic, and what emerged was the need for community guidelines.

Community involvement has spread to other conditions, including breast cancer, “with survivors involved and involved in conferences. I think people have understood that community involvement makes science better and outcomes of their adoption better,” Hankins said. “We learned that from HIV.”

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Speakers at the AIDS 2022 conference will include Dr. Theresa Tam, Director of Public Health Canada. Photo by BLAIR GABLE/Reuters

While the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly hampered efforts to tackle HIV, it has also led to innovation, he said. There was a shift towards telemedicine to treat HIV and concerns about collection of antiretrovirals were addressed.

In a session hosted by Global Affairs Canada, participants will reflect on the international community’s efforts to respond to HIV/AIDS and on lessons relevant to the fight against COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Speakers will include Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations; Dr. Theresa Tam, Director of Public Health Canada; Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS and Matshidiso Moeti, Regional Director of the World Health Organization for Africa. The session will feature video commentary by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to US President Joe Biden.

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Programming for AIDS 2022 was kept flexible to accommodate last-minute additions that reflect current issues, Routy said. One is a session on public health management of monkeypox, featuring Dr. Geneviève Bergeron of the Montreal Department of Public Health. The monkeypox virus is spread through close skin-to-skin contact, and most confirmed cases have occurred among men who have sex with men.

Public health officials announced in June that Montreal was the epicenter of the monkeypox outbreak in North America. By mid-July, nearly 10,000 Montreal men and their health care providers had received the smallpox vaccine, which is effective against monkeypox, and the vaccination campaign was extended to tourists.

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“The good news in Montreal is that the cases leveled off,” Routy said.

But on Saturday, the WHO, which has received reports of more than 16,000 smallpox cases in 75 countries, declared smallpox “a public health emergency of international concern.”

A session on the needs of refugees and other people living with HIV during armed conflicts such as the war in Ukraine has also been added to the agenda. It will address, among others…

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