Retroviruses Conference: Where to Find Reporting on the Internet

The 4th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections will take place January 22-26 at the Sheraton Washington Hotel. Abstracts, reports (either daily, or after the conference), and audio feed and slide images, will be available through various sites on the Internet. You may want to check the following sites, which are accessible without charge, and from anywhere in the world.

* Audio feed, slides, and abstracts: The conference organizers will broadcast (on the Internet) audio and slides of some of the major sessions of the conference, about 12 hours after the presentations. The equipment needed is a modem (with a DOS/Windows computer, either a 14.4 or 28.8 modem can be used; with a Macintosh, 28.8 is required), and a sound card. The system is optimized for either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, but other browsers may work as well. Users will see a picture of the presenter, with the slides changing with the talk as if one were in the room, and hear the audio (using RealAudio software, which can be downloaded through the site). There will also be a search engine to help skip ahead in a talk.

This system will be accessible through www.retroconference.org. The conference abstracts will be available through the same site; note that most abstracts were submitted months ago and have not been revised, but that the "late breaker" abstracts are new. (The "idsociety" Web address for the abstracts, which we published in our last issue, is being changed to the "retroconference" address, above; as we go to press on January 14, the "idsociety" address only has news and abstracts of LAST YEAR'S 1996 Retroviruses conference, and the "retroconference" address is not yet available. If you have problems connecting to the "retroconference" address, check the other sites for the latest information, or call AIDS TREATMENT NEWS.)

The conference organizers hope to broadcast the State of the Art talks, the two opening sessions, and one symposium each afternoon. It may not always be possible to get permission from the presenters, however, because medical journals often consider Internet distribution to be "publication," meaning that they will refuse to publish an article if the information has been released that way.

Check the "retroconference" site for the latest information.

* As we announced in our last issue, Healthcare Communications Group has organized 16 authors and writers to produce daily reports on the Retroviruses conference, to be available the following morning. Check their site at (website no longer available) - which already has useful pre-conference summaries on pathogenesis, viral markers, antiretrovirals, immunomodulation, TB/MAC, CMV, fungal infections, and AIDS-related cancers.

* The Body, an organization which provides AIDS information on the Web, will publish reports by Ramon A. (Gabriel) Torres, M.D., Director of the AIDS Center at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York, and Andy Pavia, M.D., Director of Clinical Research for the University of Utah Health Sciences AIDS Center. Coverage will include a question and answer session with Drs. Torres and Pavia. The Web site is http://www.thebody.org.

* The International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care will have daily reports by technical writers Mark Mascolini and David MacDougall, at http://www.iapac.org.

* Extensive reports of the conference will be published on the Critical Path AIDS Project site, http://www.critpath.org.

* Jules Levin will report on protease inhibitors on http://www.natap.org/

* Also, there will be many wire service and other news-media reports on the Retroviruses conference. An excellent free source for most AIDS-related daily news is the AIDS list of AEGIS (AIDS Education Global Information System), run by Sister Mary Elizabeth in Southern California. You only need an email address to use this service; you do not need access to the World Wide Web. To subscribe, send email to: majordomo@global.org, with the message:

subscribe aids
end

Note: This service sends about 15 to 20 AIDS-related news reports per day (and probably more during the Retroviruses conference). If you want to reduce email traffic, you can have the messages collected into a digest, which is sent when it reaches 40,000 characters in size. To receive the digest, send email to: majordomo@global.org, with the message:

subscribe aids-digest
end

For more information about this AIDS mailing list, send the message "info aids", or "info aids-digest" (without the quote marks) to: majordomo@global.org
Or see the AEGIS home page, http://www.aegis.com.

Note: By agreement with the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care, AEGIS will also send to its AIDS mailing list the Retroviruses conference reports published on the http://www.iapac.org Web site described above.