AIDS TREATMENT NEWS Issue #187, November 19, 1993
Gil-Kenes Travel in Philadelphia, 800/223-3855 215/568-6655, fax 215/568-0696, offers a travel/hotel package for the meeting. The lowest price listed for airfare and hotel is $1850 (for travel from San Francisco or Los Angeles); reservation requires a $200 deposit, with full payment due by May 15. Those buying the travel package can also pay the conference registration fee ($590 to March 31, 1994, $785 after that date) through Gil-Kenes Travel; or it can be paid directly to the conference secretariat in Japan. For U.S. citizens, a valid passport is required, but not a visa. See the Gil-Kenes Travel brochure for more information. Professor Yuichi Shiokawa, Chair of the Organizing Committee, has addressed some of the concerns about travel to Japan:
"No one will be denied a Japanese visa or entering into Japan simply because he or she is HIV-positive or has AIDS. No questions about a person's HIV status nor sexual orientation are asked when applying for a visa or entering into Japan. HIV testing is not required for a visa to Japan nor for entering into Japan." (From the current International AIDS Society newsletter, #8.)
For more information, contact the Tenth International Conference on AIDS/International Conference on STD, c/o Congress Corporation, Namiki Bldg. 5-3 Kamiyama-cho Shibuya- ku, Tokyo 150, Japan, phone 81-3-3466-5812, fax 81-3-3466- 5929.
Comment
After the Yokohama conference, the International Conferences will take place every two years, instead of every year. This decision was made after the San Francisco conference in 1990, but since it takes years to plan for each conference, it took four years for one to go away.
These conferences have been important for facilitating international contacts and organization that would otherwise not occur. The Yokohama conference is especially important, because it is the last for two years. Unfortunately it is also expensive.
What is needed now is much more use of electronic mail and other computer communication for AIDS work -- especially international communication for research, organizing, dissemination of prevention and care information, and other purposes. The International Conference would be much more useful if abstracts could be submitted by computer and be available to the public before the meeting. [One reason this hasn't happened is that a different group (in a different country) runs the meeting each year, so it is nearly impossible to organize such a change before it is too late to do so. Another problem is the academic-journal habit of wanting to hide information until a specified publication date -- apparently in the belief that doing so increases authors' or journals' prestige, even if, as in this case, it destroys much of the usefulness of the information, as attenders who first see the abstract books on site cannot make good use of the five conference days, due to information overload.]
Computer communication is much less expensive than meetings or phone calls, and often less expensive than mail. It allows immediate written communication, with forwarding of information to groups when appropriate. It is always available and avoids time-zone problems. Other areas of biology and other sciences are far advanced over AIDS research in using computers (especially the Internet) for international communication among researchers. Now that the conferences will be happening only once every two years, it is more important than ever for the AIDS world to catch up. [For background on electronic mail, see AIDS TREATMENT NEWS #172.]
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