You can identify the people from the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles by their black t-shirts. On the front: “Got AIDS”? On the back: “How do you know?” It’s part of their campaign to get all black Americans tested. Also encountered in the halls of the conference center: a clutch of men and women in indigenous African garb, two Vietnamese men in the saffron robes of Buddhist monks, several women from India in brightly patterned saris, and two men excellently dressed as women.

These are sights you don’t see at the typical cardiology or neurology or rheumatology meeting. Sure, medical meetings are all hugely international these days. But people from all countries dress pretty much the same. The only people who stand out are the drug company reps, who are typically younger and much better-dressed than the medical professionals.

All these national costumes make AIDS conferences quite colorful. But they also signal something fundamental – the presence of patients, advocates, and community organizers. I’ve never seen a group of patients with hepatitis C at a virology conference demonstrating for wider liver transplant availability. Or a band of heart failure patients staging a die-in at a cardiology meeting to demand new and better drugs.

But you do see such things at AIDS conferences. At my first AIDS meeting, in Amsterdam in 1992, the first story I wrote was about an ACT-UP march on the opening day that deposited several (empty) wooden coffins in the cemetery of that city’s famous Old Church. Their message: failure to develop more effective drugs was killing people.

Activists and their messages have now been incorporated into the official agenda of the AIDS conferences, so that doctors who treat people with AIDS can learn about their patients’ problems and self-help efforts. This afternoon, in one room a U.S. scientist is talking about “Cell-virus interactions as targets for drug development: theVif-APOBEC3G Axis”. At the same time, in the adjacent room, an organizer from Argentina will speak on “Defending the rights of sex workers to organize.” Which session are you going to?

You can identify the people from the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles by their black t-shirts. On the front: “Got AIDS”? On the back: “How do you know?” It’s part of their campaign to get all black Americans tested. Also encountered in the halls of the conference center: a clutch of men and women in indigenous African garb, two Vietnamese men in the saffron robes of Buddhist monks, several women from India in brightly patterned saris, and two men excellently dressed as women.

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