African-American AIDS Conference Full, Available on Web
Eighteen years into the epidemic, the first national medical conference on African-Americans and AIDS, held in Washington D.C. on February 25 and 26, admitted over 600 people, but had to tell hundreds of others that it was full. A surge of interest shortly before the meeting filled all the space in the auditorium, and no room was available at nearby hotels for a video overflow session. At this time the conference Web site is getting 15,000 visitors per day.The Web coverage, located on the Johns Hopkins AIDS site, includes complete audio and slides of almost all the speakers. Particularly useful are the brief written summaries of the talks, each about a half page of text; these can be used to decide what sessions to listen to, or for an overview of the conference (even if one's computer cannot receive the audio). Topics include antiretroviral therapy, HIV practice in a Harlem hospital, a report from Robert Gallo, M.D. on research into new treatment approaches, epidemiology of HIV in the U.S., a review of the current treatment guidelines, "Tuskegee: From Science to Conspiracy to Metaphor," the politics of getting national recognition of the emergency of the very high HIV infection rates among African-Americans, HIV in women, treatment and continuity of care in prisons, adherence strategies, and psychiatric concerns. Major areas of interest included medical care in prison, and how physicians can work on AIDS with African-American churches. The opening address was given by Donna Shalala, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
An important talk which may not have a summary on the Web is "The Disconnect Between American Healthcare and the African-American Community," by Robert Fullilove, Ph.D. Using the book "I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture" by Patricia A. Turner (University of California Press, available in paperback, 1994), Dr. Fullilove illustrated the survival value and indeed necessity of folklore in a hostile society, and the importance of establishing credibility when disinformation has often been used for social control. Professionals fighting conspiracy theories are often frustrated that they cannot simply replace a non-fact with a fact in somebody's belief system, ignoring the larger context of the belief, and the fact that folklore can be one of the most important survival instincts for a community. [This analysis may help to understand the striking parallels between separate conspiracy theories which seem to have evolved independently in the African-American and in the gay communitiescreated in a government laboratory to get rid of African-Americans, or AIDS as an anti-gay myth, a monstrous fraud that is killing people by poisoning them with AZT and other drugs.]
An expert round-table consensus meeting was held the day before, with a court reporter who prepared full transcripts in time for distribution on the second day of the conference. The transcript is not on the Web at the time of this writing, but may be placed there later. The speakers need a chance to edit their remarks first, to fix errors in the transcription.
The "1999 National Conference on African-Americans and AIDS: A National Forum on HIV/AIDS for Health Professionals Who Provide Care for African-Americans" was sponsored by Johns Hopkins University, Harvard AIDS Institute, Howard University School of Medicine, the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, and the Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University; it was funded by Bristol-Myers Squibb. Later this year there will be report-backs from the conference in several major cities, but the schedule is not set yet. Next year's conference will take place February 24-25, 2000, at the Renaissance Washington, D.C. Hotel, in a larger auditorium.
The Johns Hopkins Web site is at http://www.aids.edu. At this time the conference itself and the written summaries have separate links from the home page; it is easy to miss one or the other.
