48TH Annual ICAAC/IDSA 46th Annual Meeting, Washington DC, 25-28 October 2008 (CONFERENCE Report) (Conference News‪)‬

The highlights of the joint ICAAC/IDSA meeting included the opening keynote session on 'Global Health and Infectious Diseases--a look to the future', four special 1-hour lectures, 18 interactive symposia, 41 'meet the expert/professor' sessions and 65 didactic symposia. In addition, there was a literature review session that included the top papers published in infectious diseases, including HIV infection. From over 2800 abstract submissions, the programme committee arranged 160 poster sessions, 39 slide sessions and 15 mini-lectures. The topics covered at the conference were divided into 12 main categories and included HIV/AIDS and other retroviruses. The mix of abstract-driven and imparted sessions was designed to provide state-of-the-art information on the epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, therapy and prevention of both established and emerging infectious diseases. In one of the key presentations, Kitahata et al. [1] showed that the use of early HAART improves survival in HIV patients. The study was a collaboration among 22 HIV research cohorts in North America and data were standardised to allow their integration and analysis. It was found that starting treatment versus deferring HAART at a CD4 cell count between 351 and 500 cells/[mm.sup.3] was associated with a 70% reduction in mortality rates.