No ordinary affair. IAS 2017 report from Paris, Part One: Conference highlights

published on August 1, 2017 by Bob Leahy, in Positive Lite

Bob Leahy was in Paris last week covering the big IAS conference on HIV Science. Turns out it was the best he had been to and not just because Undetectable=Untransmittable (U=U) almost stole the show. Here is what else happened.

International AIDS Society Conferences come in two sizes. They alternate. Next year will be the big one in Amsterdam which deals with the whole panoply of HIV knowledge, including science and research and more. It will likely attract about 20,000 people.

This year’s alternate year conference was just about HIV science, a smaller affair with 8,000 or so of us in attendance from 40 countries with an agenda less community-based. In other words, it was potentially a bit dull. This one certainly wasn’t. The IAS themselves called it “an extraordinary week”. And for those like me, working in the Undetectable = Untransmittable campaign, it was intensely exciting, affirming of the role of people living with HIV in the response to the epidemic - and euphoric. More on that in Part Two.

I was privileged to be there. It’s important for us who, by hook or by crook, got to go to Paris - some of us paying our own way, some not - to acknowledge we are the lucky ones. We work like dogs there though. We seldom rest. We come home exhausted.

We also saw – and proved it ourselves - that activism is far from dead. Interruptions and protests during plenary sessions were commonplace. The people in U=U t-shirts were everywhere; many observers I spoke to acknowledged that U=U was a dominant theme, that we “owned” the conference. People saw the mainstreaming of the work of grass roots activists bloom in front of them – our work - like a rare and exotic flower. And they applauded.

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No ordinary affair. IAS 2017 report from Paris, Part One: Conference highlights

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