Single biennial HIV prevention conference planned

This year's International Microbicides Conference, held this week in Sydney, "will be the last of its kind" because "[f]rom 2014 onwards, it is planned, a single biennial conference on all aspects of HIV prevention will be held," according to an aidsmap news story. In a closing plenary session, representatives of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the NIH Office of AIDS Research, the two largest funders of HIV prevention research, "said they were proposing an 'integrative prevention meeting' in recognition of the fact that no one HIV prevention method is likely to end the epidemic and that different methods can be synergistic," the news service writes (Cairns, 4/18).