AIDS Conclave Hears Plea for Health Activism

The chairman of the eighth International Conference on AIDS on Sunday issued a dramatic call for a new world political movement organized around the issue of health, saying it is time to “champion the principle that health is a human right, not a privilege.”

Dr. Jonathan Mann of the Harvard AIDS Institute said he cannot understand why health has never reached a higher level of social and political influence, particularly since it is of such compelling personal concern around the world.

“Why do governments tremble when the inflation rate rises, yet no elections are lost over the infant mortality rate or violent deaths among adolescents? Why does national shame over the homeless or deaths from tobacco not lead to demands for change in political leadership?” he implored in ceremonies opening the annual meeting, which has emerged as the most important forum for the exchange of information about the deadly disease.

The six-day conference has attracted nearly 11,000 participants, including AIDS researchers and clinicians, activists and others from more than 130 countries.

Mann, former director of the global AIDS program for the World Health Organization, proposed creating a political movement around health, much as Green parties were spawned from the activism of environmentalists.

“To date, we have not been confident enough--bold enough--to do what we know is needed to be more effective against AIDS: to confront . . . the problems deeply embedded in the status quo of societies worldwide which fuel the spread of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), interfere with care for affected people and underlie the major causes of ill health worldwide,” he said.

“To control AIDS . . . we must proclaim a bold demand: that health . . . take its rightful place as . . . a universal aspiration, a common good of humanity,” he said.

In a related development that appeared to take many researchers here by surprise, Newsweek magazine reported that health officials are studying the possibility of a new, undetectable AIDS virus that could make blood screening more difficult.

The magazine said doctors have identified 11 cases in which patients have developed AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, but never tested positive for either of the two known AIDS viruses, HIV-1 or HIV-2.

The report, released on the eve of the meeting, came as a surprise to conference organizers, who said they hope to persuade some of the researchers to discuss their findings this week.

Meanwhile, hundreds of activists from the United States and other countries marched through the streets of Amsterdam to protest immigration regulations throughout the world that bar people who either have the disease or the human immunodeficiency virus that causes it.

The site of this year’s conference, Amsterdam, was selected by conference sponsor Harvard University to protest U.S. immigration rules that impose visa restrictions on people with HIV infection or AIDS from entering the country. The conference was originally to be held in Boston.

In addition to Mann, the opening ceremony also featured speeches from Dutch officials, a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a Puerto Rican woman from the South Bronx who has AIDS, and Dr. Eka Esu-Williams, the president of the Society for Women and AIDS in Africa.

Esu-Williams said that for many individuals, particularly women in developing countries, “surviving the era of AIDS will hinge on our own personal power.”

While the sessions on science and policy do not begin until today, some researchers began releasing advance tidbits on work to be presented later in the week.

Scientists at Harvard and the University of Dakar, in Senegal, for example, said Sunday that people infected with HIV-1, the first known AIDS-causing virus, are as much as 10 times more likely to develop symptoms of AIDS than individuals infected with HIV-2, a rarer strain of the virus.