Students on more than a dozen campuses nationwide, including UW-Madison, are using a day of silence to commemorate World AIDS Day today.
Among the day's activities, the Wisconsin Black Student Union is encouraging students to wear black clothes and remain silent between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., according to the group's president, Christopher Loving.
\We just want to show we won't be silenced any longer because of HIV and AIDS,"" Loving said.
A December 2003 report issued by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS places the 2003 death toll of AIDS at three million. Five million people were newly infected by AIDS in 2003, according to the report.
Seven thousand red flags, representing the approximate number of people dying each day of AIDS, will be placed on Bascom Hill as the centerpiece of a rally at 2 p.m. The rally's message will be directed at President Bush, who, Loving said, has ""reneged"" on a promise to spend $15 billion on the battle against AIDS in Africa over the next five years. Loving said Bush's proposal to Congress added no new money for the fight against HIV/AIDS for fiscal 2003 and added $450 million for 2004.
A fact sheet from the U.S. State Department, however, puts Bush's budget request at $1.12 billion, a 13.1 percent increase from fiscal 2002. The HIV/AIDS budget for the U.S. Agency for International Development will increase by 24 percent in the same period, according to the State Department.
Even so, Loving says money is simply not enough to quell astonishing rates of HIV/AIDS infections.
""Obviously [$15 billion] is not enough,"" he said. ""Only 1 percent of the population in Africa has access to medications for outbreaks and things, so we really need to ... make generic drugs more readily available.""
Locally, primate researchers at UW-Madison use rhesus monkeys and Simian Immunodeficiency Virus-the monkeys' counterpart to HIV-in an effort to discover a vaccine. Nancy Wilson, a UW-Madison protein chemist and assistant scientist, said research in Madison is unique because it uses numerous infection and vaccination approaches.
""One thing that our lab does better than any other lab in the world ... is that the virus we use is a clone virus,"" Wilson said. ""When we infect our animals, they're infected with one single virus, so we know the exact gene sequence. ... What we're able to do uniquely is watch as it actually evolves.""
Though the mutation rates for HIV are extremely high, Wilson is optimistic that once her lab finds concrete results in monkeys, a human vaccine would not be far off.
""If we find something that works ... we've got a pretty short route to go from 'this is what we did in monkeys and this is what works' and then take it to humans,"" she said.
