NIAID head Dr. Anthony Fauci called the results of the trial a "disappointment" but added that the study yielded "important information" that would help guide future research.

The study began in 2009, and researchers had immunized half of the 2,504 volunteers with a DNA-based vaccine called HVTN 505 that was intended to "prime the immune system to attack the AIDS virus. Then a different vaccine, encasing the same material inside a shell made of a disabled cold virus, acts as a booster shot to strengthen that response. Neither vaccine could cause HIV," according to the Associated Press.

The AP goes on to report:

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The health impact is clear: As Human Rights Watch reported,"Police use of condoms as evidence of prostitution has the same effect everywhere: despite millions of dollars spent on promoting and distributing condoms as an effective method of HIV prevention, groups most at risk of infection ... are afraid to carry them and therefore engage in sex without protection as a result of police harassment." What's more, "Outreach workers and businesses are unable to distribute condoms freely and without fear of harassment as well."

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The efforts of ALEC’s AIDS policy working group were published that year in a 169-page book containing 13 HIV-specific legislative recommendations. Some of those model laws would, after becoming real state laws, go on to effectively criminalize the behavior of people living with HIV and perpetuate a lasting stigma against HIV-positive people. Today, a majority of states have laws on the books that criminalize HIV exposure regardless of whether the virus was transmitted or there was an intention to infect another person with HIV.

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State and county health inspectors went to Dr. W. Scott Harrington's practice after a patient with no known risk factors tested positive for both hepatitis C and the virus that causes AIDS. They found employees using dirty equipment, reusing drug vials and administering drugs without a license.

Harrington voluntarily gave up his license and closed his offices in Tulsa and suburban Owasso and is cooperating with investigators, said Kaitlin Snider, a spokeswoman for the Tulsa Health Department. He faces a hearing April 19 where his license could be permanently revoked.

"It's uncertain how long those practices have been in place," Snider said. "He's been practicing for 36 years."

The Oklahoma Board of Dentistry said the inspectors discovered multiple sterilization issues at Harrington's offices, including the use of a separate, rusty set of instruments for patients known to have infectious diseases.

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The AIDS Drug Assistance Program is among the many federal programs that will take a hit if $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts go through March 1, and those cuts could potentially lead to an increase in HIV transmission, the White House said Sunday in a report on the anticipated state-by-state impacts of the so-called sequester.

The report — part of the Obama administration’s public campaign to encourage a compromise between Congress and the White House in order to avoid the austerity measures — says the budget cuts could lead to a drop in access to life-saving HIV medications and an increase in treatment costs for those infected with the virus.

“Cuts to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program could result in 7,400 fewer patients having access to life saving HIV medications,” the report says. “And approximately  424,000 fewer HIV tests could be conducted by Centers for Disease Control (CDC) State grantees,  which could result in increased future HIV transmissions, deaths from HIV, and costs in health care.”

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"How to Survive a Plague" is a nonfiction film — nominated for the best documentary feature Oscar — that depicts the early years of the fight against AIDS, specifically the activism undertaken by groups like the radical movement ACT UP to get attention from an establishment more comfortable turning a blind eye.

There's little enviable, it would seem, in their life-or-death fight. And certainly the environment today for gay men — who enjoy all the comforts straight people presume and enjoy in some parts of the country — is far friendlier. And yet there was a political galvanization during those years, at least judging by the kiss-ins and screaming denunciations of former New York City Mayor Ed Koch in "Plague," that is lacking today.

"When I think about the parallels, the differences — people do have a lot more inside access and everybody’s not going to die. [Causes today are] not going to generate the same enthusiasm," said Siciliano.

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On that count, France may gild the lily somewhat. Left out is the groundwork laid from 1982 on by the pioneer AIDS lobby, Gay Men's Health Crisis—co-founded by playwright and veteran thorn in complacency's side Larry Kramer, who moved on to help birth ACT UP once the GMHC proved too apolitical for him. The omission slights how ACT UP's radical bent ended up repositioning other pressure groups as the mainstream version of AIDS-era gay activism, an invaluable lesson in how defining the fringe can help redefine the center.

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Unlike in straight porn, condoms became the norm in gay porn because “gay male culture lives with HIV as a day-to-day reality,” says Joanne Cachapero, spokesperson for Adult Production Health and Safety Services (APHSS), which now oversees testing for the industry. It required "a few activists" to push the issue, however. J.C. Adams, an author and editor on Gay Porn Times and the author of "Gay Porn Heroes,” explains: “In the late '80s and early '90s, gay adult (porn) performed a very real public service. Producers and directors took it upon themselves to incorporate condoms into their films,” he says. Embedded in that cultural experience is the belief that condoms provide the best protection against HIV -- better than testing, which comes with a window of potential false negatives, and certainly better than taking someone's word that they're negative.

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But in the years that followed, ARV distribution was also met with criticism, said Mitchell Warren, director of AVAC, a non-profit that advocates for HIV prevention programs.

“People said we can’t do treatment,” Warren said. “Too expensive. Not feasible. No one’s going to take their pill. What about drug resistance?”
For those who have attended sessions about pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) this week at the 2012 International AIDS conference, this might sound familiar.

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If they return to the village, he or she will face a gruesome death, Ugoh said.

“They don’t care what it’s from — through blood transfusion or through sexual intercourse or through other means,” Ugoh, who is now a human rights activist, told GlobalPost. “The order is that they should be burnt alive if they come down to the village and the family will be excommunicated.”

New legislation in Nigeria that criminalizes discrimination against HIV/AIDS patients, however, could go a long way toward changing these kinds of attitudes.

And in Nigeria, they couldn't come soon enough.

Almost 3 million people are known to be living with HIV in Nigeria, according to the Network of People Living with HIV and AIDS in Nigeria, a non-profit group. More than half of those people are eligible for anti-retroviral drugs but don't receive any because there aren't enough. More than 80 percent of Nigerians as a whole do not know their HIV status.

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Across town and weather permitting, volunteers will begin laying out the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The Quilt hasn’t been laid out in full since 1996, which was, not coincidentally, when we as a culture stopped talking about AIDS. After 1995, new retroviral therapies began drastically slowing the death rate, and conversation shifted to HIV: better treatments, better tests, slowing infection rates. AIDS, that gruesome specter that had dominated the conversation for nearly a decade, and the battle against it, was put back in the closet.

But over the past year, AIDS has reentered the conversation, this time not as a spook, but as inspiration. Maybe it’s the debates over Obamacare. Maybe it’s the rise of Occupy. Maybe it’s the battle for marriage equality. Or maybe, as many former activists mentioned this weekend in D.C., enough time has passed that the post-traumatic stress that marked the fight has finally begun to subside.

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In Iringa and in three other sites in Africa, the United States and its African partners will be launching a combination of coordinated HIV prevention tools and strategies in the coming months that will test what President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been telling the world: An AIDS-free generation is now possible because the tools to prevent HIV infection are at hand.

No one yet knows whether they are soothsayers or false prophets. The trials may reveal the way ahead, or they may fall flat and leave the AIDS fight in a state of dangerous limbo.

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States and AIDS advocacy organizations are pushing for routinized testing because according to the CDC, nearly 20 percent of the 1.1 million Americans living with HIV/AIDS do not know they’re infected. Without that knowledge, of course, HIV positive people risk not knowing to seek treatment until it is too late.

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The 33-year-old outreach worker in Athens, Greece, told The Fix that the country’s austerity measures, which have eviscerated social welfare programs and curbed access to drug treatment, will lead to more deaths this season, as it has each year since the country’s economic crisis began in 2007. “It’s hot here, the addicts are dehydrated, and they pass out in the direct sun, which is dangerous,” Patsi said. “We end up calling the ambulance two or three times a month. But with the cutbacks, they don’t always make it in time. The safety nets are tearing apart.”

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