In This Issue

This week, the Black AIDS Institute will be leading a delegation of twenty activists, journalists and faith leaders to attend the 21st International AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa. This year's Conference is significant in a number of ways. This will be only the second time ever that the conference will be convened in Africa. The first time was fifteen years ago, in Durban as well. The 2001 confab was the first time the world leaders had a serious conversation about providing treatment to people living in Africa. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were dying because of the high cost and lack of access to life-saving HIV drugs. Led by activists who rejected the absurd and racist binary paradigm of prevention or treatment, and forced to confront the devastation the AIDS pandemic was sowing all over the continent—not just in PowerPoint presentations, but in the faces of people in the global village and on streets of Durban, genocide that was happening all over the continent—HIV/AIDS policy makers and funders finally made a real commitment to save Black lives in Africa.

Since then, tremendous behavioral, structural, and biomedical advances have taken place in both prevention and treatment; so have significant increases in access to treatment and care. In response to the conference, the global AIDS epidemic transformed. Today, more than 15 million people are on treatment worldwide and in South Africa the number of new infections is on the decline.

The 2016 conference marks another pivotal time, as the conference once again brings together scientists, researchers, public health workers, and community activists from all over the world to share critical new information about treatment advances, including preventative and therapeutic treatment. Today, there is much talk about ending the AIDS epidemic—ushering in an AIDS-Free Generation. But, the truth is that discussion is largely a discussion of the developed world. Once again, we are faced with the either/or proposition: treatment or prevention. And once again we must reject the narrow binary thought for an inclusive analysis that rejects any "endgame" that does not include both the global north and the global south. Black Lives matter in Baton Rouge and Botswana, in Minneapolis and Mozambique, in Dallas and Durban, South Africa.

As part of the Black AIDS Institute's commitment to increasing health literacy around HIV and AIDS, in Durban the Institute will host the Community Science Empowerment Project to help:

• Raise treatment and science literacy in the U.S Black HIV workforce and the Black community at large so we can improve access to and utilization of treatment and prevention interventions for reducing HIV/AIDS among African Americans;
• Broaden the dissemination of treatment and prevention science research to underserved U.S. Black communities so that targeted and effective strategies can be developed to reduce HIV/AIDS;
• Facilitate networking and the development of professional relationships among researchers, Black leaders, and the Black HIV workforce so we can stay up-to-date on scientific breakthroughs and developments in HIV/AIDS research.
• Look at the role of Faith Based Organizations in reaching UNAIDS goals and engage faith leaders in real efforts to confront the stigma that is unravelling much of the progress that has been made in addressing the AIDS pandemic in Africa and other parts of the Global South.

Seven leading Black Treatment advocates, eight journalists of nationally recognized expertise and experience in covering HIV/AIDS, and a number of Black faith leaders from the US will attend, learn and report from conference sessions with the goal of educating Black communities in the U.S. Beginning next Tuesday, the Black AIDS Weekly that arrives in your box each Tuesday, will become the Black AIDS Daily, publishing on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday as well, as these journalists report on the conference.

In this issue, we tell you about what the Institute, in partnership with The Ford Foundation's Institute of International Education, Gilead, Merck and UNAIDS and the Black Treatment Advocate Network will be doing to make sure you have a front row seat at AIDS2016.

Sign up, tune in, and join us next week from the International AIDS conference in Durban South Africa.

Yours in the struggle,

Phill