Why have people come to AIDS2002? Why have so many struggled, some across half the globe, to a crowded conference centre in Europe? For many reasons, of course: reasons as numerous as the number of delegates.

Wandering the corridors, it’s possible to glean some of the motives for attending, and I’d like to consider just three here that struck me as significant for the people involved, and that highlight issues around AIDS2002.

A technical adviser working in Zimbabwe expected “to find out about new and innovative” things other organisations were doing. She’s right, of course, for conferences constitute a huge melting-pot of ideas and networking opportunities that are both exhausting and invigorating at the same time.

After attending her first few sessions, she’d already discovered the flip side of this cornucopia. “A lot of us are generalists: some of it went right over my head, and some of it I know already. It’s finding the happy medium that’s difficult.”

I’m not surprised at what she says. HIV as a theme is multi-faceted, including as it does cultural, sociological, psychological, epidemiological and clinical components. Pinpointing those sessions that most closely match personal needs is the priority for all delegates.

Maybe at Bangkok there could be more ways in which people are helped to choose sessions most suited to them among the 1000s of abstracts that will inevitably be presented.

A second person said her interest was in epidemiology: “an area that tends to get forgotten when there are treatments available.” She expected to find out more about treatments and the vaccine initiatives, and would like to “see some good results.” Here, there is a different emphasis: a scientist hoping for some empirical data that will reveal new information about how to slow the spread of HIV. This perhaps emphasises both the best and potentially the worst aspects of the conference. The need to present hard scientific clinical data should be balanced against the danger of a scientific discourse overshadowing the social and cultural aspects of HIV that are, for the vast majority of people infected with the virus, the most relevant. The “knowledge” in the logo for AIDS2002 has to encompass all types of knowledge in order to be truly meaningful.

This brings us to a third person, whose comments are perhaps the most grounded in the state of HIV care in the world today. As a project facilitator in rural Zimbabwe who often feels isolated in her work, she came to Barcelona expecting to be “inspired”: she wanted to “remind herself why I do what I do.” She also hoped for a real advance in the development of a vaccine.

Her comments, tinged with pathos and hope, reveal an aspect of HIV care framed in the real world, away from all the razzmatazz of AIDS2002, a world where there is a high incidence of HIV, with no access to retroviral treatment. Her desire for a realistic, long term solution to the HIV pandemic in rural Africa, that could really work, derives from experience in the field.

These three people, with their three very different, though equally valid, expectations for the conference, demonstrate a variety that could be a metaphor for AIDS2002, and indeed HIV itself.

All ages and all cultures can fall within the HIV envelope, either as those who are infected and affected, or those who are involved in the multiple facets of care and prevention. As the fight against AIDS moves more firmly into the political domain, we must never lose sight of the breadth and depth of the global village that HIV has created, and which is represented in Barcelona this week.

AIDS 2002 Conference News produced by Health & Development Networks/Key Correspondent Team