The XVII International AIDS Conference kicked off yesterday in Mexico City and will last through the week. To most, it's the premiere event on HIV/AIDS worldwide and it occurs every two years. I was fortunate to attend in 2002 when it was in Barcelona, Spain and our Chairman Jim Cashel attended in 2004 in Beijing. I recall at the time that the online offerings that we would have hoped would accompany the actual event were rather meager, and I'm happy that they have stepped up their online offerings quite a bit for those of us who cannot attend. Some interesting features on the web site include:

• Ask a question to a moderator of a session in advance
• Webcasts (live and archived) of the major sessions and press conferences from the Kaiser Network
• A nice, interactive, action-oriented site for youth
• A fairly extensive media center with fact sheets, speaker bios, a high res photo library, etc. (In my opinion this is all critical because I definitely notice a surge in coverage of the AIDS pandemic during this event, and this is so crucial in terms of reaching the general public and keeping the issue in front of us despite our own challenges.)

On the other hand, I'm a bit perplexed about a link on their main navigation that takes you to what looks like a nice community site called 'Global Village'. At first this sounds fantastic...but it's all Spanish. Maybe some of you will be able to benefit from this more than me.

I'd love to hear from any of you who are attending the event this year!