The XI International AIDS Conference was held in

Vancouver Vancouver is a major city in Western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the cit ...

July 7–12, 1996. The theme of the conference was "One World One Hope".

Highlights

The conference's co-chairs were Martin Schechter, Julio Montaner, Michael O´Shaughnessy and Michael Rekart.

Donna Shalala Donna Edna Shalala ( ; born February 14, 1941) is an American politician and academic who served in the Carter and Clinton administrations, as well as in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2019 to 2021. Shalala is a recipient of the Preside ...

gave the plenary address. This was the first conference after the technological advance of being able to measure HIV

viral load Viral load, also known as viral burden, is a numerical expression of the quantity of virus in a given volume of fluid, including biological and environmental specimens. It is not to be confused with viral titre or viral titer, which depends on the ...

. A study presented showed that United States military had higher risk of HIV infection. The conference presented the introduction of

combination In mathematics, a combination is a selection of items from a set that has distinct members, such that the order of selection does not matter (unlike permutations). For example, given three fruits, say an apple, an orange and a pear, there are ...

therapy A therapy or medical treatment is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a medical diagnosis. Both words, ''treatment'' and ''therapy'', are often abbreviated tx, Tx, or Tx. As a rule, each therapy has indications a ...

using

protease inhibitors Protease inhibitors (PIs) are medications that act by interfering with protease, enzymes that cleave proteins. Some of the most well known are antiviral drugs widely used to treat HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C and COVID-19. These protease inhibitors pre ...

. ADARC's

David Ho David Da-i Ho (; pinyin: ''Hé Dà-yī''; born November 3, 1952) is a Taiwanese-American AIDS researcher, physician, and virologist who has made a number of scientific contributions to the understanding and treatment of HIV infection. He w ...

and his team showed their clinical trial results. Within a week after the conference, over 75,000 patients who had been using antibiotics and chemotherapy as treatment against opportunistic infections began an effective antiviral regimen which greatly increased their immune system strength and therefore their health. This marked a turning point in which HIV infection was no longer an absolute

terminal disease Terminal illness or end-stage disease is a disease that cannot be cured or adequately treated and is expected to result in the death of the patient. This term is more commonly used for progressive diseases such as cancer, rather than fatal injur ...

but a manageable

chronic disease A chronic condition (also known as chronic disease or chronic illness) is a health condition or disease that is persistent or otherwise long-lasting in its effects or a disease that comes with time. The term ''chronic'' is often applied when the ...

References

External links

A personal accountScience Magazine
special issue on AIDS for the conference
In back alleys near Vancouver's AIDS conference, the disease was gaining ground
{{DEFAULTSORT:International AIDS Conference, 1996 International AIDS Conferences International conferences in Canada 1996 in Canada 1996 conferences History of Vancouver July 1996 in Canada

Highlights

See also

References

External links