Student Research at Duke

One component of our summer programming is a set of activities addressing Responsible Conduct in Research (RCR).  Thanks to Suzanne for organizing the movie, And the Band Played On, as part of RCR.  That movie was released in 1993 with updated material from a mid-1980’s “medical chronicle” of Randy Shilts, an investigative reporter.  There are, of course, criticisms of the movie’s representation of the events, and there are probably blogs on that topic.  But since the statistics at the end of the movie are nearly 15 years out of date, Suzanne has provided us with this update.
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I just wanted to follow up from the movie last night, And the Band Played On, with the latest statistics, available from 2006.

Who knows what the world would be like today if our government, related health organizations, and scientists took quicker action in trying to prevent the spread of this mysterious disease early on? The  numbers today are staggering. I hope you got from the movie a sense of the factors that unite and divide scientific inquiry with human affairs in general. In addition the arguments that kept people from taking action and making progress spanned from intra-populational communities to the international level. The stigma of having HIV/AIDS continues today in many places and in many ways, often preventing effective treatment of the disease and prevention of its spread. Even a small but vocal group maintains that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.
All of the following information has come from the World Health Organization’s web-page, as well as their fact sheet:

http://www.who.int/hiv/mediacentre/news62/en/index.html

* an estimated 39.5 million people are living with HIV

* in 2006, 2.9 million people died of AIDS-related illnesses

* in North America there are 1.4 million people living with HIV

* there were 4.3 million new infections in 2006 with 2.8  million (65%) of these occurring in sub-Saharan Africa and important increases in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where there are some indications that infection rates have risen by more than 50% since 2004

* In 2005, a total of US$ 8.3 billion was estimated to be available for AIDS funding; this figure is estimated to rise to US$ 8.9 billion in 2006 and US$ 10 billion in 2007. But it falls short of what is needed––US$ 14.9 billion in 2006, US$ 18.1 billion in 2007 and US$ 22.1 billion in 2008.

Suzanne