Viennese lessons

The most dreaded acronyms that one can encounter might arguably be HIV and AIDS, terms that, because of their import, need not be explained further. They can spell pain, disease, and death, mixed together with ostracism and fear.

Nineteen thousand people from 193 countries converged in Vienna the past week, all for the purpose of participating in the 2010 AIDS conference, and hopefully, to keep on trying to change the connotations of those terms. (If only I had the cash and the time, that number would have been 19,001.) You might think that's an astounding number of participants just for a conference, but that number is nothing compared to the figure that's being floated around as the number of people now living with the virus: a shocking five million. 

Well, apparently, things went swimmingly in Austria despite my absence. Bill Clinton opened the conference (theme: Rights Here, Right Now), and the term "Global Village" was stuck on to promote the feeling of solidarity, perhaps in a nod to Hillary. Annie Lennox provided some star support, and various other VIP's like the Crown Princess of Norway and the First Lady of the Republic of Georgia, came to be counted. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was supposed to address the participants, via video, on the closing day.

As usual, medical developments garnered the most attention from the press. There seems to be hope for an anti-HIV vaginal gel that women can apply before "exposure," although that isn't completely virus-proof. There was a module on how HIV and hepatitis-C interrelate, and another on how tuberculosis impacts on persons with AIDS. (Did you know that one out of four deaths HIV are related to TB? So the experts are saying if they're able to address the TB factor, those deaths could dramatically decrease!)

Meanwhile, just by looking at the site devoted to the conference, I find that lots of new acronyms were being bandied about, acronyms that make me feel I'm no longer part of the 'in' crowd. Of course there's the usual "MSM" (men who have sex with men) and "PWA" (Person with AIDS) terms that have been there for decades. But aside from that, there were other terms that befuddled casual observers, aka me.

For example, there is now "PLHIV", or 'persons living with HIV'. I surmise they meant to stress the continuing presence of life. There was "PPTCT", which meant 'prevention of parent-to-child transmission,' which just means the efforts of certain NGOs to minimize transmission of the virus from mother to child. Then there was 'HCV,' which was employed together with HIV (and it took me awhile to figure out that since HIV meant human immunodeficiency virus, HCV must mean just the simple hepatitis-C virus.)

I was looking at the various modules, and there were symposia devoted to the medical field, the legal field, the political field, etc. So I wasn't surprised to see ART mentioned somewhere, like "ART and Prevention", but when I checked it out, it had no reference to how the arts promote healing or some other theory like that. It actually means 'anti-retroviral therapy' - the cocktail of drugs used to combat the virus. Yes, stirring that mélange of drugs into a potion and combining doses of this and that to form a potent weapon has indeed evolved into ART.

Rome will see the International AIDS Society (or "IAS") meet in 2011, but the more important thing to note is that in 2012, the XIX International AIDS conference has been set in Washington D.C. That's a major development, as the conference has never been held in the United States before. This was because of the deep prejudices the United States government had against PWA's. Before, PWA's were barred from entering US territory under the impression that they would put the population at risk. A knee-jerk reaction driven by fear, much like what our hospital personnel did to foreigners they suspected as having SARS (another acronym we haven't heard in a while.) But the US government has relented, and apparently, PWAs will no longer be banned. Another way the acronyms' stigma are being slowly whittled away. 

(Chelsea Clinton is getting married - I wonder if she and her husband got tested as a condition to their betrothal?)