UCSF AIDS Forum: Learning How to Fight the Pandemic
By Jeyling Chou
Associate Editor
It is no secret that HIV/AIDS is a pandemic—it is the acronym that needs no explanation.
In the United States, there are an estimated 50,000 new infections per year with the burden heavily placed on African Americans, Latinos, gay and bisexual men. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the epicenter, with millions of deaths from the disease every year. This Saturday, an on-campus event will strive to put another face behind the epidemic: the UCSF student.
This Saturday, November 7, the 21st Annual UCSF Student AIDS Forum will bring together HIV/AIDS experts, patients living with the disease, and the budding health professionals currently being trained here. The mission of the forum will be, as it has been for the last two decades, to inform and invigorate UCSF students in the fight against AIDS.
“We want to have students be inspired by the work that’s being done and learn how we can be the next generation of people fighting,” said Meghan Woods, a second-year medical student. Along with Uchenna Okoye, also a second-year med student, Woods is a co-coordinator of this year’s forum.
“We don’t learn a whole lot about HIV in the regular curriculum, and this is the best way that students have to get a broad overview of what’s happening and learn in depth about specific things,” Woods said.
The agenda for Saturday’s event, which runs from 7:45 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Cole Hall at Parnassus, includes two keynote speakers and three breakout sessions on various topics. The issues to be covered are profound and comprehensive, including: injection drug use, a global perspective of the pandemic, mouse models for new HIV treatments, and women’s health in Africa.
Although the trajectory of the disease since its discovery in 1981 has been volatile on a global scale, HIV research has seen many breakthroughs. Drugs for HIV/AIDS developed in the last few years have shifted the course of the epidemic.
Study of the virus, Woods points out, has revealed intricacies of the human immune system, while the delivery of treatment has required new innovations and cultural sensitivity in public health efforts.
The intersecting worlds of AIDS research and activism are not quiet – especially not in this city or at this school.
But above all, it is important that the conversation continues.
“HIV is such a disease of opportunity,” Woods said. “It will exploit people who are economically disenfranchised, or disenfranchised by their gender, mental illness or substance abuse. Those are the people who get HIV.”
Woods, who was involved in HIV counseling before coming to medical school, speaks passionately about the importance of forums such as these that provoke discussion about the complexity of the disease and the global access to care.
“It needs to be on the forefront because that’s how HIV is spread: it’s through health disparity,” she said.
“In the U.S., it’s the people who don’t have health insurance, who don’t have access to care. Globally, the people who are the most affected are the people who live in the most poverty. If that’s not being talked about, that’s not going to change.”
Registration for the forum is still open at www.ucsfstudentaidsforum.eventbrite.com
This article appeared in the November 5, 2009 issue of Synapse.
