International AIDS Society Stunned After MH17 Tragedy Hits Home


As news of the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (or MH17) began to break, many unexpected threads to the tragedy emerged — among them, reports that scores of AIDS researchers were traveling to the annual International AIDS Society conference in Australia.

When the dust cleared, it seemed that initial losses of AIDS researchers were smaller in number than the first reports suggested — but the tightly knit community of AIDS researches is reeling from the sudden, violent, and unpredictable deaths of esteemed community members.

Humanity has undoubtedly personally witnessed the shift from AIDS as a near-instant, unstoppable killer to HIV as a dangerous but treatable (if not curable) infection — and by all accounts, Dutch researcher Dr. Joep Lange was a huge part of those gains in the fight against AIDS.

Dr. Lange and his partner were among six confirmed conference attendees killed in the crash of MH17, and Craig McClure, UNICEF’s top HIV/AIDS advocate, spoke to Mother Jones about the loss of one of the society’s most prolific contributors, who he said “changed the face of the epidemic.”

McClure calls Lange “a giant in HIV research,” and the site paraphrases him in adding:

“… his pioneering early work on combination antiretroviral trials… led to a crucial, and hard-won, advancement in the fight against AIDS. Antiretroviral therapy consists of the combination of at least three drugs that act in concert to suppress the HIV virus, slowing its replication in a patient’s body. Deployed in the mid-1990s, this treatment allowed an HIV diagnosis to be viewed as something other than an automatic death sentence.”

McClure also said:

“His contribution there in the early years was phenomenal… But he was also very involved in the early years of work on prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and the role antiretrovirals play there, and pediatric treatment.”

In the reporting from the scene at the 20th International AIDS Conference at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, it was observed that in a community marked in ways by devastating losses, this one was no less deeply mourned:

However, UNICEF senior advisor Ken Legins commented on the heartbreak experienced by attendees:

“We’re used to remembering people that die of AIDS, and now I’m going to remember people because they’re shot out of the sky. It just seems unfair but it’s a community that’s used to dealing with things that are unfair… With the same passion, caring, and love that we have always drawn upon to adjust to this epidemic, we will adjust to the challenges of managing the loss of the people on that flight.”

Legins added:

“I really think you’ll see recovery. But that’s not to say that people are not greatly affected by what happened, it’s just f—ing unbelievable.”

Initially, several dozen MH17 victims were believed to have been en route the conference, but that number has been revised, and six known attendees were killed in the incident.

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