News Archives

April 2004

AIDS Science Day Draws a Crowd for Review of Current HIV/AIDS Research

Nearly 300 people crowded the first floor of EPH on April 23 to listen to experts describe current research on a variety of HIV/AIDS-related topics ranging from violence against women and HIV risk in South Africa to community attitudes towards syringe exchange in Springfield, Massachusetts. The event was AIDS Science Day, sponsored by Yale’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA), which, in its fifth year, highlighted the HIV/AIDS research being conducted at Yale, CIRA’s two collaborating institutions, the Hispanic Health Council and The Institute for Community Research, and within the community.

A day-long series of panels addressed the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic among various marginalized populations in the U.S. and abroad, HIV/AIDS clinical research, and HIV/AIDS risk and prevention as it relates to gender and power. Research done in local communities, such as Hartford, was presented, as was research done in a variety of countries, including China, Nicaragua and India. Andrei Kozlov, Ph.D., Dr. Sci., Director of the Biomedical Center and Professor at St. Petersburg University, who collaborates extensively with CIRA scientists, spoke about the status of Russia’s expanding HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Jeannette Ickovics, Ph.D., presenting "Psychological Resources Protect Health: Five-Year Survival and Immune Function among Women in the HIV Epidemiology Research Study (HERS)."

In addition to panels, the event featured a poster session and seventeen community booths where representatives of community HIV/AIDS organizations discussed volunteer opportunities, student internships, and their organizations’ interests in community-based research.

The day’s final event was a keynote panel entitled “Politics, Ideology, and HIV/AIDS Prevention.” The panel was moderated by Michael H. Merson, M.D., Anna M.R. Lauder Professor and Dean of Public Health, and Director of CIRA. Panelists included Judith Auerbach, Vice President, Public Policy, American Federation for AIDS Research (amfAR), Kevin Cranston, Acting Director, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, HIV/AIDS Bureau, Ana Oliveira, Executive Director, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and Margaret Weeks, Associate Director, The Institute for Community Research.

Merson introduced the panel by arguing that politics and ideology have intruded into science-based prevention, research and community action relating to HIV/AIDS. Merson and Weeks are among the over 150 National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded scientists researching HIV/AIDS, sexual activity and drug use whose names are on a so-called “hit list” generated by the Traditional Values Coalition and used by Republican lawmakers to challenge the research NIH funds and the research priorities it sets.

Robert Heimer, Ph.D., presenting "A Pilot Program of Methadone Maintenance in a Men's Prison in San Juan, Puerto Rico."

Oliveira’s presentation underscored the importance of researching the challenged topics. “Social vulnerabilities and social contexts,” Oliveira said, “are making a huge difference in AIDS deaths.” To illustrate her point, she cited statistics from New York City: while the number of new HIV infections in Harlem, a socio-economically struggling part of the city with a large minority population, and in Chelsea, a relatively affluent section of the city with a large gay population, are very similar, the number of AIDS deaths in Chelsea is second lowest in the city, and much lower than Harlem’s.

Oliveira also described the effect of federal audits on community organizations: not only do such audits divert enormous human resources away from the group’s work, but, because government provides a large percentage of the budget of many such organizations, they also serve to intimidate the group and influence its actions. Similarly, Weeks described the tremendous cost to on-going studies of dropping everything in order to respond to the NIH requests for information that followed inquiries to NIH from Republican members of Congress sympathetic to the arguments of the Traditional Values Coalition.

Auerbach articulated the concern of many scientists that scientific evidence is being ignored, misinterpreted and misused. In discussing current efforts to use politics and ideology to influence and affect the course of HIV/AIDS prevention and research, Cranston noted that “some of what is going on now is not new, even if it is unprecedented in degree.”

Primary EPH faculty members who presented their research at AIDS Science Day panels included Trace Kershaw, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in the Division of Chronic Disease Epidemiology (CDE), Robert Heimer, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Division of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases (EMD), Kaveh Khoshnood, Ph.D., M.P.H., Assistant Professor of Epidemiology in EMD, and Jeannette Ickovics, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Epidemiology in CDE and Director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Program. A number of other EPH faculty, research assistants, postdoctoral fellows and students presented posters and were members of the research teams whose work was presented.

-Story by Christy Gordon