{"id":5307,"date":"2014-07-19T20:42:48","date_gmt":"2014-07-20T00:42:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/?p=5307"},"modified":"2014-07-19T20:42:48","modified_gmt":"2014-07-20T00:42:48","slug":"mood-solemn-in-melbourne-as-aids-2014-starts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/mood-solemn-in-melbourne-as-aids-2014-starts\/2014\/07\/19\/","title":{"rendered":"Mood Solemn in Melbourne as AIDS 2014 Starts"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is unquestionably\u00a0a shadow cast over\u00a0this year’s international AIDS meeting here in Melbourne, and it’s not the result of the Australian winter. It’s the crash of\u00a0Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, of course, which prematurely ended the lives of hundreds of people — including many people en route to this conference, most notably one of the field’s\u00a0finest clinical researchers and leaders, Joep Lange.<\/a><\/p>\n

I of course knew Joep (much better than he knew me), and greatly respected his work. He is especially well known for his efforts to make HIV treatments available globally. This achievement is\u00a0perfectly summarized by Marty Hirsch, quoted in today’s Boston Globe<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

He was a leading light, and he was a person who pushed probably as hard or harder than anyone for equity in the field, to make the drugs that we were using in the US and Netherlands available at a low cost for people in underserved areas of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of his research collaborations is particularly noteworthy given the location of this year’s conference: Along with David Cooper from Sydney and Praphan Phanuphak f<\/span>rom Bangkok, Lange\u00a0was one of the founders of the HIV-NAT\u00a0Research Collaboration<\/span><\/a>, with NAT standing for “Netherlands Australia Thailand”. This productive effort\u00a0started in 1995 — one year before combination ART became standard of care! — and was a true model of how countries with diverse backgrounds and economic resources could work together to improve HIV care and research.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, everyone\u00a0here is heartsick about this senseless loss.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is unquestionably\u00a0a shadow cast over\u00a0this year’s international AIDS meeting here in Melbourne, and it’s not the result of the Australian winter. It’s the crash of\u00a0Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, of course, which prematurely ended the lives of hundreds of people — including many people en route to this conference, most notably one of the field’s\u00a0finest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hiv","category-patient-care","category-policy"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}