At the opening ceremony tonight delegates watched a short excerpt of a film about the polio vaccine – a vaccine that has virtually eradicated the “dread disease” of the last century.

The title of the documentary, not yet released, was The Shot Felt Around the World.

The lessons for an HIV prevention conference were clear: working together to achieve the “impossible”, a committed effort by a team of scientists thinking outside of the box (daring to use a killed vaccine in the design) and working around the clock.

As important was the overwhelming support of the community including parents and teachers to stop polio – bringing 1.8 million children for shots of the experimental vaccine.

Dr Christopher Bates, director of the Office of HIV/AIDS Policy in the US President’s Office, picked up on the theme of “making the impossible possible”.

He indicated that the release of the national HIV strategy was one month away.

Dr Henry Gabelnick – a chemical engineer when he started his career – was honored with a lifetime award for his contribution towards microbicides research.

He spoke about what he had learned over the last 20 years, leading up to the latest generation of microbicides using ARVs.

Dr Gina Brown from the US Office of AIDS Research said that microbicide research had applications for many other fields.

For instance, research into how to objectively measure adherence will be relevant to other studies, she suggested.

M2010 co-chair Dr Ian Gowan emphasized the importance of building bridges between all stakeholders in the field – one of the themes of the conference that is being held in the city of bridges.

He also spoke about how gay men are once again at the forefront of the need for HIV prevention just as they were the face of HIV in the early days of the epidemic in the US, before the epidemic shifted to being predominantly heterosexual with most new infections in Africa.
Gowan said men having sex with men on the African continent needed to be a focus.

He urged everyone to stand up to the increasing groundswell of homophobia and human rights violations across the world.

As Sunday Times editor Ray Hartley says in The Wild Frontier today, the sentencing of two gay men in Malawi to 14 years of hard labor “represents a new low-water mark for tolerance on the African continent”.