MONTREAL — The Montreal organizer of the 24th International AIDS Conference says the event helped highlight the huge advances being made in HIV research and treatment technologies.
Dr Jean-Pierre Routy, local president of the international conference, believes that the biggest breakthrough of this 24th edition will have been research which shows that a single injection of a long-lasting antiretroviral drug can prevent people from contracting a HIV infection for two months, rather than taking pills every day.
Despite visa issues that prevented hundreds of delegates from attending the Montreal conference, Professor Routy says people from 172 countries attended the event, which ended on Tuesday.
But Tinashe Rufurwadzo, director of programs, management and governance at “Y+ Global”, an international organization of young HIV-positive people, gives a bittersweet assessment of this “AIDS 2022” conference.
He admits that attendees were able to have encounters that might not have been possible otherwise, such as with government officials and pharmaceutical executives. But he regrets that many voices have not been heard because of visa problems.
More than 9,000 people were expected to attend in person, and another 2,000 registered to participate online.
