A blog about the 16th International AIDS Conference, Toronto, Canada, August 13-18, 2006.
For a serious conference, there were a lot of laughs at the closing ceremony.
Mark Wainberg: "Many people have said that this was one of the best conferences ever at linking the north and the south. I hope they were not talking about the long walks that we have subjected you to between the two separate buildings of this conference site."
(To get from the Global Village, the Media Centre and the main entrance to the main session rooms, the delegates had to ascend one escalator, traverse a skybridge that crossed a dozen-or-so train tracks, and descend another three-or was it four-escalators.)
Later in his address, Wainberg reiterated his disappointment at the absence of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, yet praised the Government of Canada had been generous in its support of the conference before adding, "I think it is safe to assume that the president of Mexico will attend the next conference."
Stephen Lewis recounted a story from a recent visit to Swaziland: "He revealed that he was circumcised, I revealed that I was, and there was a joyous frenzy of male bonding among all the circumcisees."
Lewis recounted the story to denounce the bureaucratic shufflling that have delayed the official acceptance of circumcision as a prevention tool.
Many of the closing remarks addressed human rights--universal access to medical care as a human right; women's' rights as a human right--and the stigmatization of groups with a higher risk of contracting the virus. The chair of the 2008 Mexico conference, Dr. Luis Soto Ramirez, made a strong point: The only thing the virus asks is, Are you human?
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