Comment by Penny Saunders
The 5th National Conference on AIDS (November 22-25), run concurrently with the Conference of the Australasian Society for HIV Medicine, proved to be an arena where activists, medical professionals and support workers presented different and sometimes conflicting perspectives on HIV/AIDS.
The conference, entitled "Living with HIV — The Next Decade", covered a wide range of topics on the future of AIDS research, epidemiology, social issues and so on, against the backdrop of hopeful predictions that the spread of HIV infection in Australia has been contained.
However, many groups that attended the conference argued that little attention was paid to key issues for HIV positive people. ACT-UP, the AIDS coalition to Unleash Power, pointed out that positive people's groups such as People Living With Aids/HIV Coalition, were not consulted about the structure, organisation and content of the conference. ACT-UP also commented that its demands for representation and consultation, free registration for HIV positive people, and the inclusion of an activist component were met with dismissive and arrogant responses from the conference steering committee.
To counteract this ACT-UP, as well as other groups like Positive Women and Aboriginal activists, maintained a strong educational and activist presence throughout the conference.
In its favour, the conference did provide a forum for many excellent speakers in the medical, social welfare and support fields. For example, members of the national prostitutes' network Scarlet Alliance, presented powerful arguments for the need to decriminalise prostitution in all Australian states as an important initiative to provide safe work places and practices for sex industry workers.
On the other hand, my experience of the conference certainly confirmed many of the criticisms raised by AIDS/HIV activists.
A presentation by lecturers and researchers from the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research which I attended, demonstrated the inability of the medical profession to carry out relevant and socially sensitive statistical analysis. Studies aimed at investigating the rate of heterosexual transmission of HIV to women concentrated on pregnant women, because in the researchers analysis this group could be assumed to be heterosexual. To my mind, this is a totally unfounded and misleading assumption.
Throughout the conference very little space was given to women's concerns, and only one paper in the entire four-day period dealt specifically with lesbian issues. Meanwhile, the epidemiologists expressed their confusion over statistical results which show that lesbian and bisexual women intravenous drug users present a higher incidence of HIV infection compared to heterosexual women intravenous drug users. Perhaps if more appropriate research was carried out on have more answers.
All in all, the 5th National Conference on AIDS was exciting and challenging, perhaps due to the number of young activists who stood their ground against the conservative and self-interested medical and pharmaceutical industry.