Summit Update

At NMAC, we call the Biomedical HIV Prevention Summit: The Summit.  We believe the combination of PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) and TasP(Treatment as Prevention) can build real pathways to end the epidemic.  Join us December 4-5, 2017 in New Orleans at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside.  Thank you Gilead, Avita, and the Levi Strauss Foundation for your support of the Summit.

Unlike USCA, the conference that celebrates the diversity of issues impacting our movement, the Summit is a single-issue conference focused on biomedical HIV prevention.  The meeting looks at implementation science and how to bring the promise of PrEP and TasP to communities hardest hit by HIV.

Last year NMAC held the first Summit.  Here feedback we received from Gus Cairns from an article in NAM:  aidsmap,

“The US National HIV PrEP Summit, which took place in early December in San Francisco, was one of the most extraordinary HIV meetings I have ever been to. This first-ever gathering of 600 people involved in PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) provision in the USA (plus 25 non-US scholarship recipients, mainly from Europe) was already designed to be something different from the standard HIV ‘discover-test-treat’ conference. But fate then intervened to make it happen at an extraordinary time – in between the US election and Donald Trump’s inauguration. The election result totally changed the conference’s atmosphere and meaning.

The PrEP summit was designed as an event of celebration and hope. Its structure, its speakers, even the way the plenary room was designed and the way the speakers dressed, all conveyed one message: we are all in this together, and PrEP really is the game-changer we have been looking for.

Plenary talks were given in the round, from a low stage in the centre of the room. So were panels, with discussants sitting in white designer chairs. Slides were shown, but in the corners of the room behind our heads, so people looked at the speaker instead.

The atmosphere was more akin to gay men’s prevention conferences in the 1990s than treatment conferences. There was little sense of hierarchy or experts-versus-learners. One prominent presenter came out as having just started PrEP, to warm applause. Workers for stern-sounding federal bureaus were hard to tell from community spokespeople. Discussions were facilitated by an ‘MC’, the activist Ken Williams, better known as the blogger ‘Ken Like Barbie’, who has no federal job to lose.

The conference audience was also notably different. A majority of attendees were women, about 50% were black, and flamboyant rather than conservative gayness was much on show. There was also a large, conspicuous and involved trans* contingent, mainly women but some men.”

Last year the Summit was sold-out and unfortunately we had to turn people away.  This year the Summit can accommodate 1000 delegates.  Register early because we must close close the meeting when it reaches capacity.

Important Summit Deadlines

• August 4^th Scholarship Deadline
• October 6^th Sponsorship Deadline
• November 3^rd Early Bird Registration