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The 18th International AIDS Conference began yesterday in Vienna. This year’s conference, entitled “Rights Here, Right Now,” emphasizes gender sensitive, evidence and human-rights based HIV/AIDS interventions. In 2005, the Group of 8 (or G8) countries in their meeting committed to universal access to HIV treatment. However, that goal is far from being met. Additionally with the approaching 2015 Millennium Development Goal deadline of the United Nations to reverse the spread of HIV and AIDS, accountability is a main focus of the conference. The goal of the gathering is to intensify political and financial commitments to ending the pandemic in the midst of the global economic crisis and will also highlight the connection between HIV and broader health and development goals. Ahead of the conference, President Obama announced the U.S.’s first-ever formal National HIV/AIDS Strategy last week. The plan aims to address the now thirty-year-old epidemic in the US by decreasing the number of infections by 25% over the next five years, increasing access to care, and reducing HIV-related health disparities. Many praise this effort, but some activists criticize what they consider insufficiently ambitious goals. While Obama has allocated $30 million from the healthcare overhaul toward implementation of this strategy, the President’s HIV plan provides no new funding.

GUEST: Dana Van Gorder, Executive Director of Project Inform, a San Francisco based HIV/AIDS advocacy group that has served as a member of the community-based committee that called for the development of the Strategy.

Find out more at www.projectinform.org.