Checking the AIDS 2012 report card

The 19th international AIDS Conference produced a flood of reports, recommendations and warnings about the epidemic. The head of a leading AIDS advocacy group questions whether such meetings are getting too big and too complex.

AVAC Executive Director Mitchell Warren says on a scale from one to 10, he gives AIDS 2012 a score of five. He gives the conference high marks for political commitment, vision and rhetoric, but low scores for science and – what he called – the “nuts and bolts” of what comes next.

“The conference is too big, too long. So you have all of this noise and the challenge is [in] the next week or two how do we cut through that noise and figure out, for me the single most important question, now what?”

 The conference program is the size of a phone book, listing many sessions from...

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