HIV and ID Observations

A bit more travelogue from the XVII International AIDS Conference:

• It’s impossible to see everything you want at such a large, sprawling conference, sometimes because of conflicting meetings, sometimes because the room is full, sometimes because of a feeling analagous to being in a giant museum for too many hours — fatigue just takes over.  But I’m sure glad I didn’t miss Myron (Mike) Cohen’s plenary session Tuesday AM on HIV Prevention.  It’s easy to get cynical about HIV prevention efforts given the number of recent failures in the field (vaccines, acyclovir, microbicides …), but as Cohen pointed out, some things out there are working, and he outlined a very reasonable (and optimistic) strategy for how this epidemic could be controlled.  Plus he did it in his typically energetic and entertaining fashion, all the while maintaining absolute academic rigor.  Don’t miss his name-brand idea for a combination product containing tenofovir, emtricitabine, and maraviroc — brilliant.  Some web casts are worth watching, and this is one of them.
• Missing from this International AIDS Conference were the phonebook-thick abstract listings. Instead, we received the abstracts on CDs, a move that definitely saved lots of trees, sore backs and shoulders, but made it very hard (ok, impossible) to flip through the abstracts.  I´m sure this is a direction that more meetings will take, but will definitely take some getting used to.  USB drives will be coming soon, as CDs as a storage medium are definitely on the way out. 
• Speaking of USB drives, the speaker-ready room was shut down on Wednesday for a while due to — I´m not making this up — a computer virus acquired from some rogue USB drive.  Many jokes followed about computer condoms, vaccines, and microbicides, but I´ll leave it right there!
• I’ve already written about food here in Mexico City, but only from the Infectious Diseases perspective.  Now I’ll be my mother’s son (she’s a food writer), and say the restaurants have been terrific, the food fresh, interesting-tasting, and reasonably priced, and the service attentive and professional.  But — there was one glaring exception, and unfortunately it was the food at the convention center, which consisted mostly of wilted salads, sandwiches with scary soft meat-like products (colored a disturbing faded gray), and (I think, don’t hold me to this) tuna salad.  As lines for food during lunchtime were 15-30 minutes long, it became quite easy to skip the mid-day meal or subsist on potato chips, water, and coffee, probably not the healthiest diet on the planet.  I got back to my hotel room absolutely famished every day.
• All of these conferences have a theme — this one is “Universal Action Now” (italics theirs).  Pretty good.  I suppose one could fashion a challenging trivia quiz, asking people to match the theme with the city and date:  “Time to Deliver” (Toronto, 2006), “Access for All” (Bangkok 2004), “Knowledge and Commitment for Action” (Barcelona 2002), “Break the Silence” (Durban 2000), “Bridging the Gap” (Geneva 1998) … Good sentiments all, but Durban wins by a mile.  Of course if they had the conference in Boston, the theme would be, “Let’s go Red Sox.” 

(I guess I’m getting a bit homesick.)