Written by Qingyan Ma
The 2014 National Conference on HIV/AIDS was held from October 19 to 21 in Beijing. The HIV/AIDS conference was organized by the Chinese Association of STD & AIDS Prevention and Control, the largest AIDS related NGO in China and sanctioned by the Chinese government. Ms. Peng Liyuan, the first lady of China as well as the Goodwill Ambassadors of the WHO, Mr. Wang Peian, the deputy Director of the National Health and Family Planning Commission of P. R. China, and Mr. Zhang Wenkang, the former Minister of Health and the current Chair of the association came to the opening ceremony. The organizer invited Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, David Ho and Christian Brechot and granted them medals for their contribution in the field. In addition, representatives from the WHO and UNAIDS all joined the opening ceremony. The conference was part of the celebration of the 50 year anniversary of establishment of the diplomatic relation between China and France, so the French Ambassador also joined the opening ceremony and gave a short speech. CCTV, Xinhua News Agency and other national media have broadcasted the opening of the conference. One attendee commented that: “If it is not AIDS, what conference of a disease can draw the national leader to show up?”
More than one thousand people from all over China attended the conference, including clinical HIV physicians, frontline CDC staff and medical researchers, and 50 of them gave presentations. In addition to keynote speakers Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, David Ho and Christian Brechot, people who presented on the first day of the conference were mostly from institutions in Beijing. The second day of the conference was divided into five concurrent panels, including Clinical Treatment, Epidemiology, HCV, Mother-to-infant Transmission and Ethics, Law and Society. Dr. Cai Weiping from Guangzhou Eighth People’s Hospital, where our searcHIV China site is also based, presented on the treatment for HIV-HCV co-infection.
Among all the presentations, there were two that focused on HIV cure research. One was Françoise Barré-Sinoussi’s keynote speech, “On the road towards an HIV cure”. In addition to introducing current cure research status and strategies, in her presentation she said that she believes functional cure is the most likely form of HIV cure in the future. With the tight schedule of the conference, there was no Q&A section. However, from my casual conversations with attendees during the break, people’s general feeling was that cure is still a novel notion. Nonetheless, another presentation about cure was from Dr. Sun Yongtao, an HIV doctor from Tangdu Hospital in Xi’an. His team is recruiting patients in a functional cure trial project in China right now. When I asked him about how far China is from an HIV cure, he said: “The US and Europe are leading the run. China is following. The question is how far away China is behind the leader.”
At the present stage, a cure seems almost out of imagination for most people in China. But when HIV cure becomes the latest trend in the research on AIDS, China is not an exception. However, what HIV cure and its research entails are not only medical issues, but also ethical, social and political perspectives, which is the focus of our searcHIV team.
