The International AIDS Society (IAS) congratulates the scientific journal The Lancet for its decision to encourage researchers to enrol more women into clinical trials and to plan to analyse data by sex as a matter of routine, not only when known to be scientifically appropriate.

The step taken by the Lancet follows scientific evidence showing that men and women experience disease and respond to treatment in different ways. A study published recently by the same journal showed that women who smoke have a higher risk of coronary heart disease and lung cancer than male smokers. Also, in many diseases women have more side-effects from treatment than men, due to differences in body surface areas, body mass and amount of adipose tissue. Similar studies show how being female or male can be an important factor of health, illness and response to treatment than what we know now, and The Lancet’s decision to encourage a gender-oriented policy for clinical trials will hopefully help to provide more data on this aspect. More...

Sam Banda Junior, Media Scholarship Recipient and Reporter for Blantyre Newspapers, Malawi, was able to experience a state of the art media centre for the first time at IAS 2011

This was my first time at an international HIV/AIDS conference and I am grateful for the opportunity I was given.
v This being my first experience of a large conference on HIV, I wanted to learn as much as possible about the latest findings in the HIV field. Also, I wanted to link up with fellow media representatives from other countries and get to know the state of the HIV epidemic in their regions.

As Malawi is one of the countries in the African continent with little access to ARV therapies, I wanted to hear from drug manufacturing companies what kind of initiatives they are undertaking to make ARVs more accessible. More...