AIDS TREATMENT NEWS Issue #308, December 4, 1998
John S. James

Major HIV Topics Covered

HIV-related topics at the IDSA conference included antiretroviral therapy (with a section on salvage therapy), HIV transmission and prevention, HIV care delivery and economics in the U.S. and elsewhere, perinatal transmission and HIV in children, lipodystrophy and other adverse effects of drug therapy, drug resistance, opportunistic infections, tuberculosis, hepatitis B and C, post-exposure prophylaxis of HIV, physician experience, patient adherence, basic research on HIV biology and pathogenesis, newer antiretrovirals (including hydroxyurea, and FTC), new diagnostic tests, and vaccines.

IDSA presentations that were *not* AIDS-specific included evidence that CMV infection may be a risk factor for heart disease (in the U.S., CMV infects more than half of the population by age 20); and a report that syphilis has reached an all-time low in the U.S. (but is concentrated in certain areas, with 6% of U.S. counties, mostly in the South, accounting for 85% of newly reported cases in 1997).

Summaries of several of the most important HIV-related sessions--written by Frederick L. Altice, M.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine at Yale, are online at The Body, http://www.thebody.com.

AIDS TREATMENT NEWS did not cover this IDSA meeting in person.

Searching the IDSA 98 Abstracts

The abstracts of the IDSA conference were submitted in advance, and those which were accepted for presentation are available online. You can search these abstracts--almost 800 of them--for any word or for combinations of words, at the IDSA Web site, http://www.idsociety.org. (At the site, select "IDSA Meetings & Conferences," then "1998 Annual Meeting Abstracts," then "Abstracts-On-Line(R).") The first time you use this software, you will be asked to make up a user name and password; remember these for faster access next time.

The software at the site allows you to create a "personal itinerary"--a collection of results from multiple searches-- which can then be printed in order, without repeating abstracts which turned up in more than one of your searches. Also, the personal itinerary feature is helpful if you want to print a large number of abstracts or titles (or save them locally on your computer).

Comment: Conference Confusion

The IDSA conference received little attention for a meeting of its size--a result of historical accident, especially the fact that there are too many AIDS-relevant meetings in the fall and too few in the spring. Until recently, the IDSA meeting was coordinated with ICAAC (the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, an annual meeting organized by the American Society for Microbiology); the IDSA meeting was two days before or after ICAAC, in the same city and usually the same hotel, so it was easy to attend both. Those IDSA meetings were much smaller-- several hundred physicians sitting in a single hall all day, hearing ten to 20 top-quality lectures by leading physician- scientists, primarily reviewing changes in the field, rather than presenting original research findings.

Now the organizations have ended their coordination, and the IDSA meeting has expanded to compete with ICAAC as a large, multi-track forum for presentation of new medical and scientific information. So ICAAC, IDSA, and the International Congress on Drug Therapy in HIV Infection are bunched together--between the World AIDS Conference (in June or July, even-numbered years only), and the important Retroviruses conference in January or February. Researchers do not know whether to present at ICAAC or IDSA, as the audience is split since it is hard to attend both.

Meanwhile there is a lack of similar conferences in the spring. So if a research advance misses the Retroviruses conference, the researchers may not present it at all until next summer or fall--often more than a six-month delay.

A solution would be for IDSA to hold its research conference in the spring, so that it does not compete with ICAAC for the same presentations--as is now the case not only in AIDS, but in other areas as well. Then researchers could present their results more quickly, at whichever meeting happened next, and more people would attend both.

Another helpful conference innovation would be a public online forum where researchers could add new information to their conference abstracts at any time, if they chose to do so.
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