July 28th, 2019

Really Rapid Review — IAS 2019 Mexico City

Photo by Justine Camacho on Unsplash.

As I noted last week — and you did read last week’s post, didn’t you? — the International AIDS conference first took place in Mexico City in 2008. Last week we returned to this sprawling, vibrant city for the 2019 meeting.

It was an excellent, well-run conference — with one small complaint.

But more on that later… On to the content, a Really Rapid Review® of the highlights.

One big plus to this year’s conference — the number of research posters was smaller than usual, increasing the quality of accepted studies.

Also, being in Mexico City in the summer remains a joy, with cool weather (remember the altitude!), friendly people, extraordinary sites and cuisine, and relatively reasonable prices.

My only complaint? No, not the traffic — that’s terrible in every big city.

It was the conference Wi-Fi, which tortured every attendee in a particularly excruciating way. Your computer and/or phone would indicate everything A-OK, no problem, then give access to the internet in brief spurts, lasting at most seconds — followed by prolonged periods of unresponsiveness. Completely impossible to do anything.

Yes, I’ll get over it.

8 Responses to “Really Rapid Review — IAS 2019 Mexico City”

  1. Joel Gallant says:

    A wonderful summary. It was a great conference: perhaps the best IAS ever. The city was as you describe.

    My complaint (I quickly gave up on WiFi and used 3G) has to do with the continued use of vertical posters, where the presenters have only two choices: to stand in front of (and obscure) their own poster, or to stand in front of the one next door. Meanwhile, depending on the size of the poster, Conclusions are usually at thigh or knee level.

  2. Jasmin Hiestand says:

    Thanks for the nice summary – and nice shirt “long time no syphilis”

    • Laura Waters says:

      Thank you! The t-shirt is from PrEPster – a UK advocacy group who have expanded to campaign no syphilis awareness as well as PrEP!

  3. Great summary very useful

  4. David K says:

    “TLD?” But the one-letter-abbreviation “D” has already been taken by darunavir (D/C/F/TAF).

  5. Eric says:

    Thank you! As always, a great summary!

  6. Jay says:

    Hi Paul,
    Very nice summary indeed, thank you!

    Is there any reason to not switch patients with good treatment adherence to 2-drugs therapy?

    From biological and chemical point of view (since there are no studies, that I know of) wouldn’t better to switch patients to Rilpivirine (Juluca) instead of lamivudine (dovato), since rilpivirine is a nNRTI and therefore, at least theoretically, wouldn’t interact with human cells DNA, henceforth not inducing mutations, as opposed to lamivudine a NRTI.

    Thank you.

  7. Robert D says:

    Thank you as always for the summary! Would love your thoughts though…..for an International AIDS (bold, italic) conference, shouldn’t there be a greater number of presentations on opportunistic infections, advanced HIV, AIDS-related death, etc? More from sub-Saharan Africa? We counted one poster on cryptococcal meningitis and one oral abstract, for an illness which accounts for 15% of all AIDS-related deaths.

    So many of these talks represent first-world drugs, first-world problems, etc.It’s probably a bigger issue than this single conference, but pretty reflective overall.

HIV Information: Author Paul Sax, M.D.

Paul E. Sax, MD

Contributing Editor

NEJM Journal Watch
Infectious Diseases

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