Miami Herald, - Saturday, June 10, 1989
Rosemary Goudreau, Herald Staff Writer

This was the year that people with AIDS took center stage. It started the first day, when a group of about 200 protesters stormed the stage and delayed the opening ceremonies. From then on, AIDS activists were visible participants, sometimes shouting down speakers they didn't like.

This year, it became clear that HIV infection is treatable, although not yet curable, and that an early diagnosis of infection is important for prolonging life in the 1.5 million people in this country alone who are believed to be infected.

"This conference is like a patient dealing with a disease. First there was denial, then anger, then acceptance and now we're getting on with it," said Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of AIDS programs at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

But the conference, which once a year provides the world with a massive dose of AIDS statistics and information, as well as a hint of what might lie ahead, is in jeopardy.

Some of the world's top scientists are threatening to boycott future meetings. They are talking instead about presenting their findings at smaller, purely scientific gatherings, from which social scientists and AIDS activists are excluded.

"If it stays on this trend, personally, I wouldn't be willing to continue to come to this kind of meeting," said Dr. Flossie Wong-Stahl, the chief of molecular genetics at the National Institutes of Health, one of the principal people to genetically code the AIDS virus.

Said Dr. Robert Gallo, a virologist and co-discoverer of the AIDS virus: "People are saying to me, and I mean hundreds of scientists, that this is the end. . . . We're not even finding each other to talk to."

More than 11,000 people from 87 countries attended this year's conference, an increase of 4,000 over last year. The issues ranged from religion to retrovirology and from transmission to testing.

"We didn't expect this amount of diversity," Gallo said. "I appreciate women's rights, but I would like a choice of knowing whether I'm coming to a meeting on women's rights. I might prefer not to."

Next year, the meeting is to be held in San Francisco, where local homosexual activists have rescheduled their annual Gay Pride Week to coincide with the AIDS meeting. Next year's chairman, John Ziegler, said Friday that registration may be limited to 12,000.

Mechai Viravaidya, who runs population control programs in Thailand, said it is important for basic research scientists to mingle with social scientists at this meeting.

Dr. William Heyward, the chief of international activities for the Centers for Disease Control AIDS Program, said the mix of people got to be a little much.

"I've heard people stand up and say, 'I'm a prostitute and I have this to say.' I heard a guy say, 'I'm an IV drug abuser and have been for 15 years.' I've never seen this at a conference before, this interaction between the public health target and the public health provider."

The protesters' main message is that it is taking too long to get research trials going and, to get drugs that some people believe work and to get health care for people who need it.

"We're desperate," said Larry Kramer, a well-known AIDS activist. "We know the cure is over there and we can't get it."

The group's shouts drowned out Dr. Stephen Joseph, the commissioner of health in New York City, as he talked about a proposal to require doctors to report the names of people who test positive for HIV.

"Resign!" they chanted. "Commissioner of death!" they cried.

Joseph said later that the protesters had "a misguided sense of who the enemy is." The presence of 110 exhibitors -- most of them drug companies or manufacturers of medical supplies, a sign that AIDS is big business like cancer or heart disease -- was also jeered.

AZT, the only drug now available for AIDS, costs about $10,000 a year per person.

"The people who can afford that are the people who drive Rolls-Royces," Viravaidya said. "But most of the people in the world ride buses, and they are going to miss the bus."

During the conference, Dr. Samuel Broder, the head of the National Cancer Institute, updated research on several drugs, including ddC and ddi, that caused improvement in infected patients' cells and appear to stop the virus from replicating.

He also said researchers have genetically engineered a molecule that "definitely works in the labs" at neutralizing the virus' ability to bind onto the white blood cells that mastermind the immune system.

Gallo also said that man-made CD4 is the most promising strategy against AIDS but that it would be years before a practical therapy might be available.

The other promising news was about vaccines. Dr. Jonas Salk, the creator of the polio vaccine, reported an experimental vaccine that appeared to wipe out the virus in three infected chimpanzees and was found to be safe for human use. It is about to enter trials.

Altogether, the research was characterized not as breakthroughs, but as progress in that direction.
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