Politics joins scientists at AIDS meeting

BY PETER CALAMAI
SCIENCE WRITER
The drawn-out controversy in the U.S over the alleged distortion of scientific evidence by neo-conservatives and the religious right is thundering down on the International AIDS Conference here next month.

More than a hundred U.S. activists will come to Toronto for the six-day meeting, organized into a "strike force" to counter presentations where ideology, prejudice or opinion are warping the scientific evidence about prevention, a leading AIDS campaigner told the Star this week.

"We're prepared to combat situations at the conference where more ideological positions are taken," said Judy Auerbach, an official with the Foundation for AIDS Research in Washington.

The Aug. 13-18 meeting, expected to draw as many as 26,000 participants, is the 16th edition of the premier event in the HIV/AIDS field, put on every two years by the International AIDS Society. Past meetings have featured both major scientific advances and heated political clashes.

Clashes are again expected in Toronto over ideological flashpoints such as the Bush White House insistence on giving a high profile to sexual abstinence in government HIV prevention programs, despite low success rates.

In apparent response to such opposition, the Bush administration — despite its wide-ranging, multi-billion-dollar commitment to fight HIV/AIDS — at first restricted conference attendance to just 50 scientists or policy-makers from the two U.S. government agencies mostly responsible for AIDS research, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. That's a fifth the numbers sent to previous such conferences overseas.

NIH officials said they had negotiated another 18 places, bringing their total to 43. A CDC spokesman wouldn't provide details about numbers.

"The conference is at the crossroads of science and politics. It will suffer because of this quota," said co-chair Mark Wainberg, a McGill University professor and top Canadian AIDS researcher.

Despite the Bush restrictions, conference officials estimate as many as 2,000 participants will come from the U.S.

"Our conference will be extremely strong from both the scientific and community standpoints, but would have been even stronger still if not for the policy being enforced by the U.S. government," Wainberg wrote in an email.

The quota means numerous well-known scientists from CDC and NIH won't be coming, Wainberg said. Some didn't even bother to submit presentation proposals because they saw so little chance of getting travel approval.

Many of those given the green light to take part are bureaucrats from the two agencies rather than the leading scientists "who would have loved to attend," the conference co-chair said.

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