Highlights from CROI 2016

published on April 13, 2016 by Geoff Honnor, in Gay News Network

If there’s one big international HIV conference that’s still worth following, it’s CROI. Geoff Honnor reports on this year’s highlights.

There was a time long ago, way back in the late 1990s, when the proceedings of international HIV conferences were of compelling interest to the body positive here in NSW.

The biennial World AIDS Conference held in Vancouver in 1996 famously heralded the advent of combination therapy and the possibility of a treatment-led end to AIDS. While predictions of an end to AIDS proved to be a tad premature, combination therapy did offer the possibility, then the probability and now the certainty of life continuing for those of us living with HIV.

Each new drug emerging from trials to join the combination therapy arsenal was cause for celebration, just as each new international HIV conference was the precursor for post-conference feedback sessions where sector workers and affected communities and dozens if not hundreds of people turned up to hear the latest treatment news.

I can recall a large whiteboard on the wall of the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations (AFAO) office in Wentworth Avenue which was regularly updated with the latest HIV drug to be approved by PBAC. It acted as a barometer for the rising tide of wellness, re-energising our community and eventually that rising tide and the resumption of normal life caused large-scale interest in post-conference feedback sessions to wane. For those interested, the internet increasingly provided ‘just like being there’ access to conferences from Copenhagen to Cape Town for those interested and everyone else just got on with life – and that’s a good thing

However, if there’s one big international HIV conference that’s still worth following, it’s CROI – the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections – held annually in the US, alternating between Boston and Seattle. CROI has become the world’s most prestigious HIV scientific meeting through the simple expedient of applying very rigorous attendance criteria in selecting the 4,000 aspirants lucky enough to make the annual cut.

Basically you need to be a published researcher or eminent clinician with a few spaces reserved for HIV NGO leaders. Those not eligible to attend include venture capitalists, financial analysts, PR puffers and pretty much anyone involved in ‘commerce’ full stop, well, unless they’re prepared to be a major sponsor I suspect.

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Highlights from CROI 2016

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