Florence Conference Overview

Most news-media reports of the Seventh International Conference on AIDS, June 16-21 in Florence, Italy, emphasized the lack of useful clinical information. While these stories are largely true, they do do not give the whole picture. About three thousand scientific reports were presented, and these included background information on most of the drugs we have covered in AIDS TREATMENT NEWS -- and also some new potential treatments which were unfamiliar to us.

The shortage of practical, definitive medical information is not the fault of the conference. Although this year's meeting emphasized basic science (the theme was "Science Challenging AIDS"), there was plenty of room for important medical reports. The problem is that many obstacles -- commercial, academic, political, and regulatory -- and the lack of both funding and of national leadership, have kept important research from being done. Studies duplicate each other, produce indecisive or unreliable results, or address questions which will be obsolete before the study is done, because researchers face an obstacle course in which it is hard to make anything happen. They do what research they can, since the alternative is to do nothing; there is often no option of doing what is needed. The past year has seen significant progress in making clinical research more productive -- although shortage of funds is increasingly impeding progress. Results of the new trials were not ready for this year's conference, although many believe that important new
information should be available by next year's conference, planned for May 1992 in Boston.

The single area of greatest interest at the Florence conference last week was vaccines, especially those designed for treating persons already infected with HIV. Important information was also presented on ddC/AZT combination therapy, the anti- angiogenesis approach to developing KS treatments, and the value of keeping T-helper counts above 50.

In this issue and the next two, we will cover in depth some of the practical information from the Seventh International Conference on AIDS.

This issue also has important non-conference information -- for example, an article on angiomatosis (a treatable opportunistic infection sometimes misdiagnosed as Kaposi's sarcoma, MAC, or other conditions), and an announcement on obtaining free access to clarithromycin for treatment of MAC (MAI).

How to Obtain Conference Abstracts and Tapes

* In our articles on the Florence conference, the references in parentheses are to the abstracts of the meeting, unless otherwise stated. The program and abstracts have been published as a set of three books, which includes subject and author indexes; these books were given to persons attending the conference. The easiest way to obtain this material is to convince a local AIDS organization to acquire a set -- which will probably cost about $100, unless someone who attended will donate theirs.

Anyone interesting in buying the abstracts should send a fax, including their mailing address and return fax number, to the Seventh International Conference on AIDS, fax number 396.4453369 (in Rome); arrangements for the purchase, such as means of payment accepted, have not yet been made final. Note that this office for post-conference inquiries is scheduled to close on September 30.

* Besides the abstracts, audio tapes of almost all the conference meetings are available. You can purchase the tapes at any time from InfoMedix, in Garden Grove, California; they can be reached at 800/367-9286 (U. S. and Canada), or at 714/530-3454; their fax number is 714/537-3244. It is helpful to have a conference program available, as well as the InfoMedix order form, to select the tapes desired; the 320-page program is included with the abstracts.

The submissions considered most valuable by the official conference reviewers were assigned to oral sessions; therefore, they are usually available on tape. The referees usually judged by academic rather than practical standards, however, and as a result, the useful information which did appear at the conference was scattered throughout the presentations.