Did the AIDS Cure Get Shot Down with MH17?
Internationally recognized researchers heading to #AIDS2014 were onboard the Malaysian plane shot down, crashing those searching for a cure.
The International AIDS Council and the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melborne, Australia, held a global one-minute moment of remembrance in of the delegates traveling to the conference that perished in the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 that was brutally shot down from a ground to air missle over Northern Ukraine earlier this month.
The 60 seconds of rememberance was supported onstage of the AIDS 2014 conference with eleven, former, present and future Presidents of the International AIDS Society with reps from all the organizations that lost members of their respective teams in the accident.
With nearly 12,000 conference attendees leading the global HIV mourning for those lost (at times being reported as many as 100 HIV activists on board MH17, though unconfirmed), IAC released the names of 6 delegates that were confirmed on board the flight: Pim de Kuijer (STOP AIDS NOW!), Joep Lange (co-director of the HIV Netherlands Australia Research Collaboration), Lucie van Mens (Director, AIDS Action Europe), Maria Adriana de Schutter (AIDS Action Europe), Glenn Thomas (World Health Organization), and Jacqueline van Tongeren (Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development).
Besides the understated, valuable personal lives and relationships that these activists and globally-respected leaders lead (and their family and friends lost because of the tragedy), these leaders in the HIV research community is unparralled. For example, one of the researchers killed is credited with discovering how to eliminate the transmission of HIV from mother to child during childbirth.
President Obama made a statement on July, 18, 2014, about the plane crash in Ukraine and made mention of the HIV/AIDS community’s loss:
On board Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, there were apparently nearly 100 researchers and advocates traveling to an international conference in Australia dedicated to combating AIDS/HIV. These were men and women who had dedicated their own lives to saving the lives of others and they were taken from us in a senseless act of violence.
In this world today, we shouldn’t forget that in the midst of conflict and killing, there are people like these — people who are focused on what can be built rather than what can be destroyed; people who are focused on how they can help people that they’ve never met; people who define themselves not by what makes them different from other people but by the humanity that we hold in common. It’s important for us to lift them up and to affirm their lives. And it’s time for us to heed their example.
Diane Anderson-Minshall, Editor of HIV Plus Magazine makes this statement:
At HIV Plus, we feel the incalculable loss that is upon the world as more than 100 people in the HIV and AIDS communities, including researchers, physicians, advocates, teachers, healthcare workers, and people living with HIV, perished in the this week’s Malaysian plane crash in the Ukraine. That perhaps 108 people en route to the 20th International AIDS Conference in Australia were lost among the 298 passengers that we know were were killed means we have lost more than just friends and family—itself a tragedy. We have lost allies in the three decade old fight to prevent, treat, and cure HIV and AIDS. We also know that stigma against HIV may impact our ability to ever get an accurate count of people on that plane that were headed to the IAC, especially knowing that there are HIV-positive people who have not disclosed and whose names will be released by the airline but not necessarily by conference organizers or their families (for privacy reasons). This is not the first aviation disaster to claim a scientist working on HIV. In 1988, Irving Sigal died in Pan Am Flight 103 disaster over Lockerbie, Scotland. As a molecular biologist, Sigal had helped develop early HIV medications. And in 1998, Jonathan Mann and Mary Lou Clements-Mann, two pioneering researchers, died in the crash of Swissair Flight 111 near Nova Scotia. Whether it’s a worldwide tragedy or an ordinary death at home, those of us who have worked in the HIV community in the last three decades have lost innumerable colleagues, allies, and friends to the disease itself. But rarely instantaneously like this. As we struggle through our own shock and grief, we encourage everyone to mourn the loss of all of the passengers of flight 17, and send our thoughts to their family, friends, and communities. With the passing of those compassionate and dedicated HIV researchers, advocates, and organizers who had already dedicated their lives to saving other people and many who made the world a better place in their short lives, we need to remember to do what they have always done: trudge on in the fight against HIV and AIDS. This week’s conference will go on, and groundbreaking research will be presented by the survivors; the rest of us, especially the media, must turn this tragedy into a learning experience for other Americans, to remind everyone that AIDS is still will us, that we still need money, people, and resources to fight it, and that the people living with HIV or AIDS need our care and support, not our discrimination and stigma.
Was the knowledge and experience of these activists, researchers and friends of the HIV/AIDS community lost? Were they on the verge of the global cure of HIV that we’re all wanting? Was the CURE lost on MH17?
It’s not a question that can be answered today, as we all continue to mourn. But it is, a question, worth asking and reflecting.
I send my condolences to AIDS 2014 on the losses.
