By Julie Davids on Friday, March 02, 2007.

Julie Davids is the Executive Director of CHAMP (Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project).

Twenty years ago, AIDS was burning through the country and decimating whole communities while Reagan fiddled away. ACT UP New York burst onto the scene with a rallying cry of "drugs into bodies," shutting down Wall Street over the price of AZT, the only treatment and the most expensive drug ever marketed.

The group grew into a powerful and innovative social force—with hundreds of independent chapters worldwide—and racked up hard-won victories from the accelerated approval of the drugs that turned around the epidemic in the U.S., to changing the very definition of AIDS, to include the conditions seen in women and injection drug users so they could access research and benefits, to the establishment of underground and legalized needle exchanges, to the vigilant defense of the civil and human rights of people living with HIV.

There are now few chapters—many tragically and literally died off as members lost their personal battles to AIDS, and others waned in the Clinton era—but the struggle continues: ACT UP Philadelphia has just won expanded access to condoms in city jails, and a new chapter in Austin Texas is going strong.

On March 29, ACT UP NY and its allies will commemorate this two-decade legacy with a march to Wall Street—but this time, the demand is for health care for all and single payer health insurance, as well as drug price controls.

Meanwhile, this week at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), health care policy was not a big part of the agenda, given that this long-standing scientific confab focuses on research ... but it looms large for anyone following the science on HIV prevention, and for the dozens of web-cast sessions at the conference that dealt with prevention technology, policies, and epidemiology.

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