Opinion Pieces

By Linda-Gail Bekker, IAS President and and Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health There is a saying in South Africa: Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo. You strike the women, you strike the rock. On International Women’s Day, we want to celebrate the strong women who have always been at the heart of fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For more than 35 years, women have modeled strength and resilience ...

By Linda-Gail Bekker, IAS President and deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre

To the youth of today, the HIV epidemic is old. It arrived before the Internet, before the Berlin Wall came down, and at a time when you could still smoke on airplanes. It can be difficult to fathom but, unlike those of us from earlier generations, today's young people have never known a world without AIDS.

By Stefano Vella, IAS Governing Council Member and David Wilson, Global HIV/AIDS Program Director, The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA

The International AIDS Conference in July celebrated the success of antiretroviral treatment (ART) in reducing illness and death. The pall of despair that hung over the the previous Durban conference in 2000 has truly lifted, and in one of the great success stories of global health 17 million people have begun ART. Despite this achievement the mood was...

By Chris Beyrer, IAS President

Last week´s United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) High Level Meeting (HLM) on Ending AIDS in New York was both inspiring and painful. The exclusion of civil society organizations was profoundly wrong - but the commitment of so many great activists, scientists and political leaders was so heartening.

By Chris Beyrer and Michel Kazatchkine

America’s growing epidemic of prescription drug and heroin abuse is forcing a long-overdue reckoning with failed national drug policies. Having long treated substance use as a matter for the police and prisons, many policymakers are finally coming to understand drug dependence as a disease and public health problem, to be faced with science and empathy.

By Linda-Gail Bekker, IAS President-Elect

Each year, March 24 marks World Tuberculosis Day. One day in the year when the world's lens will focus on the fact that almost 4,000 people globally die every day as a result of this preventable, curable disease.

By Sharon Lewin, Director, Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

I´ve been in Boston this week attending the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI). While here mixing it with my colleagues, I´ve been reflecting on where we´ve come scientifically on the path towards an HIV Cure.

By Chris Beyrer, IAS President, and Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health

In many ways, this is the most hopeful World AIDS Day we have seen in the 35-year history of the scourge that we know as HIV/AIDS. Yet, it is also one of the most challenging, in terms of the work we still have to do to translate scientific progress into more saved lives, fewer new infections and ultimately an end to the AIDS ...

By Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, former IAS President and Margie McGlynn, President and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI)

An ounce of prevention, Benjamin Franklin famously said, is worth a pound of cure. But that is not always true when it comes to research into infectious diseases. Though scientists have traditionally tended to focus on either prevention or cure, defeating the HIV/AIDS virus will require researchers – and their funders – to collaborate to addres...