AVAC in the News

To ensure that high-level promises are kept and to get the funding we need to effectively implement the tenets of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, we need our A-list soldiers on the line. In that spirit, we offer the following list of 100 people we feel have great impact on HIV/AIDS in the United States today. We have many of them to thank for the progress we’ve recently made. These people are also likely to keep the heat on in the months and years to come.

Last week, 2,499 gay and bisexual men and transgender women from four continents made history when the iPrEx HIV prevention trial reported positive results.

In the next few months, said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, an advocacy group for AIDS prevention, “we’re going to see a cascade of results” from trials of what is called “oral pre-exposure prophylaxis,” or “oral prep” for short. In them, men and women who are not infected with the AIDS virus but who regularly engage in high-risk sex, like anal sex without condoms or sex for money with strangers, take a daily dose of one or two of the antiretroviral drugs normally taken by infected people.

This year, for the first time, we mark the Day with hope based on evidence from a trial in humans that shows that an AIDS vaccine is possible.