Scientific and clinical conferences are an essential part of the HIV calendar.  Experts gather to debate, discuss and share information, learning from each other, making useful contacts and presenting their work.

Attending these conferences has become an important part of our calendar too. NAM reports from all the major HIV conferences across the world to keep you up-to-date with what’s happening at the cutting-edge of HIV medicine and social research.  

Sometimes there might only be one or two of us at a conference, absorbing the workshops and the information being presented and writing about it for aidsmap.com, so that all the people who can’t be there can hear about the latest developments.

Sometimes there might be a whole team of us – so that while our editors are busy covering the workshops, our outreach team can be available to meet the people who are working in HIV all over the world and talk to them about what we do.  We will sometimes have a stand, where we can display our resources and encourage people to make the most of what we have to offer them.

When we are attending and reporting on a really big conference (in particular the International AIDS Conference, which happens every two years and the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections which takes place every year), there may be a lot of news stories and it can be difficult for the conference delegates to have an overview of important news – and of course even more difficult if you’re not there!

For these conferences, NAM’s editors put together a bulletin each day, highlighting interesting new reports.  That way you can receive an email with brief summaries of lots of news and links to more in-depth reports.  Each day of the conference these bulletins are translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian and sent out just a few hours later in these languages.

The most recent major conference we attended was the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City, in August 2008. Have a look at our Mexico page to get a flavour of our coverage – and you can also download our daily reports.

If you sign up to any of our email bulletins, we will let you know when a conference is coming up.  If you would like to support our conference work in some way, or if you would like an RSS feed of our news, please contact us.