Retroviruses Conference: Where to Get Information

AIDS TREATMENT NEWS will continue to summarize presentations from the Retroviruses conference, but more detailed and technical information can be found elsewhere, especially through the Internet.

One of the best in-depth sources of information about the Conference is the Web reporting of Healthcare CommunicationsGroup, (website no longer available). Each night a team of leading AIDS physicians and treatment writers summarized major presentations from the day before, creating extensive reports which healthcare professionals can use for CME (continuingmedical education) credit. The writing is aimed at physicians, and is often difficult for those without some background in AIDS treatments. This reporting was published despite strong opposition of the Conference organizers (the Steering Committee of the Scientific Program Committee).

For excellent reviews of treatment developments, at a lesstechnical reading level, see the Project Inform site, http://www.projinf.org/.

Other useful sites, all of which have different material,are:

The American Medical Association, http://www.ama-assn.org/. This has links to the Healthcare Communications Group site and to the official Conference site (see below). It also has relevant news releases, and essays by experts.

The Body ("an AIDS and HIV resource"), http://www.thebody.com/retro197/retro197.html, includes reports on the Conference by Andrew Pavia, M.D., and Ramon(Gabriel) Torres, M.D. Also, it allows you to ask them questions electronically; the questions and answers are then posted for public access.

The International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care has a series of reports from the Conference which were written for its journal. Its site is at http://www.iapac.org/

The National AIDS Treatment Advocacy Project, http://www.natap.org/, has reports focusing on protease inhibitors.

The official site of the Retroviruses conference, www.retroconference.org, includes only about a third of the talks which were given. It does have many of the slides shown in those talks, the only place the slides are generally available. The talks themselves are in audio, not in text; one can select a slide and hear the part of the talk which goes with it. The published abstracts of the talks are also available on a different page of this site, with a search function to find all abstracts which contain a certain word (e.g. the name of a drug). Unfortunately, the address of the abstracts page has been changed from time to time, apparently to prevent other sites from linking directly to the abstracts (and bypassing the Conference's home page and survey); this means that a "bookmark" (for easily getting back directly to the abstracts later) may not be reliable; it is better to bookmark www.retroconference.org, and go through the introductory pages and survey each time. Also, one is likely to encounter technical problems before successfully using the audio and slides.

Immunet (http://www.immunet.org) is preparing a page to link to all of the sites reporting on the Retroviruses conference;it should be ready within a week.