Hope lies in today’s youth

Aug 20th, 2008 1:43 PM UTC
By Chris Scott

Yesterday’s International Herald Tribune covered this month’s 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City and outlined many of the most difficult challenges we face in our work. At the conference Bill Clinton concluded that “with no magic bullet in sight… the need now is to combine efforts to advance prevention and treatment.” The article also goes on to note that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has developed a new test that can pinpoint new infections and control them more quickly in developed countries. However, this test still needs to be “refined for use in poor countries” and many participants were unhappy with an eight-month delay in reporting the test’s success.

Reading through the article, one part stood out to me. Even in the face of an often overwhelming crisis, there remains a tremendous glimmer of hope: young people.

There were calls for innovation and recruiting more young investigators to the AIDS field. As Alan Bernstein, executive director of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise in Manhattan, put it, “The engines of discovery are new people.” Bernstein noted that recruiting new workers should be less of a problem than in the past because of an explosion of interest on university campuses about global health.

You can read the full article here.

TAGS: HIV/AIDS, President Bill Clinton