High school students from the Washington, D.C., area were encouraged to get involved by HIV/AIDS researchers, healthcare workers, and patient advocates during two days of presentations and discussions.

The year 2007 was a roller coaster for the HIV/AIDS community, with great strides and bitter disappointments in the fight against HIV.

The United Nations dropped its estimate of the number of HIV-infected people worldwide by 7 million, and a new class of anti-HIV drugs made it to market. At the same time, trials of a promising HIV vaccine ended early in a shocking failure, and new surveys found that about 1 in 20 people in Washington, D.C., are infected with HIV—the highest rate for any city in the United States.

Worldwide, 33.2 million people are infected with HIV. Sub-Saharan Africa has been hardest hit by far, with 22.5 million people infected.

It was against this backdrop that HHMI investigator Bruce D. Walker and his colleague Bisola O. Ojikutu delivered the 2007 Holiday Lectures on Science—“AIDS: Evolution of an Epidemic”—at HHMI's Chevy Chase, Maryland, headquarters. An annual event, the lectures are presented to high-school students from the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and to a live Webcast audience.

In the United States and other developed countries, HIV infection has been transformed from a death sentence to a manageable chronic illness. But Walker and Ojikutu, who split their time between the Boston area and the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa, emphasized that HIV remains devastating for over 70 percent of the world's HIV-infected people, who lack access to the best treatments. The lecturers noted that the combined efforts of scientists, clinicians, and public-health professionals—both present and future—will be needed to successfully fight this epidemic.

Ojikutu, director of the Office of International Programs of the Division of AIDS at Harvard Medical School, reviewed the rapid scientific advances since the discovery of HIV and development of an HIV antibody test. Then she demonstrated an HIV test by being tested herself along with Zinhle Thabethe, training coordinator of iTEACH—an organization that aims to improve HIV and tuberculosis education and care at Edendale Hospital in KwaZulu-Natal. Thabethe's test was positive, but “this is not new for me,” the 30-year-old told her audience. “When I was 25 years old, I discovered I had HIV. I was only a little bit older than you are now when I was infected.”

Walker, who is director of the Partners AIDS Research Center at the Massachusetts General Hospital, explained in his lecture how the virus attacks the immune system by infecting CD4 cells, which ordinarily help to keep invading disease organisms at bay. Over time, HIV kills off enough CD4 cells that viral levels rise and the HIV-positive person becomes susceptible to opportunistic infections such as tuberculosis.

Photo: Paul Fetters

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