The next issue of HIV treatment update, this summer’s edition, will be the last one.
HTU, 21 years old this year, is one of the oldest
continuously published HIV newsletters in the world and has kept up a high
standard of news, comment and reportage. It remains one of NAM’s best-recognised publications:
but it has started to make less sense than in the past to dedicate increasingly
pressured resources to a print magazine, no matter how high its production
values.
We still have a loyal group of print-issue subscribers and, for
subscribers reading this, we are grateful for your continued interest, your
loyalty, and your suggestions and queries. From what we know (through the
results of readers’ surveys over the years), many of you are of the generation
that helped set up NAM and immediately benefited from it: people like me,
mostly older gay men, infected in the early days of HIV, long-term survivors –
or friends of those who did not survive. We’re a group who got into the habit
of educating ourselves about the treatment and science of HIV at a time when
rapidly acquiring such knowledge might be a life and death issue; you might
learn about a potentially lifesaving clinical trial just in time, for instance.
Two things have changed fundamentally since then: the nature of HIV
treatment and the way people acquire knowledge.
These days, although HIV infection may still have serious health
consequences, we know, essentially, how to deal with it. If you are diagnosed
with HIV, even with a low CD4 count, you’re unlikely to have to do your own
research into frontier science. If you come down with a rare cancer you may
have to, but that’s not necessarily a health issue specific to your HIV (though
we will continue to cover news on conditions strongly related to HIV, as in the
hepatitis C treatment update in this issue).
The crucial factor in stopping HIV infection in its tracks is access to HIV treatment. However, access to
information is still central to living well with HIV. And access is
overwhelmingly about social, economic and psychological circumstances. If you
are a well-informed, well-connected, well-adjusted person who tests regularly
for HIV, gets diagnosed in plenty of time, works with your doctor to choose the
best treatment regimen to start on, and are able to look after your health more
generally…then you are highly likely to live a normal lifespan. The people who
still die early from HIV are most often the poor, the homeless, the refugees,
the survivors of abuse, the depressed, the alone. And even if you are one of
those people whose health hasn’t suffered, you may have concerns related to
other, non-health-related, aspects of living with HIV.
That’s why HTU, starting about
four years ago, consciously widened its coverage to include pieces on
everything from housing (in this issue), employment and benefits, through the
science of mind and of society (as in the piece on self-stigma in this issue),
to psychology and mental health, to
faith and religion.
Broader coverage implies a broader audience. Although funded as a
newsletter for people with HIV in the UK,
we know that when HTU articles appear
on NAM’s
website, aidsmap.com, they are also read by patients, researchers, doctors and
people working with HIV all over the world. To preserve the added value of a
print subscription, we originally published articles online three months later.
But once the decision was taken to publish them online at the same time as in
print, it started making less sense to do a print edition for an ever-reducing
group of print subscribers – especially as surveys also tell us that readers
have easy internet access and are comfortable with finding their HIV and health
information online.
This links to the second reason we have decided to change. It is not so
long ago that when I wanted to do in-depth research for the background to a
treatment piece, I had to go to the British Library, sit at a desk, and send
for physical copies of articles to look at. These days that’s almost
inconceivable; we’ve got so used to a world in which information is instantly
available online that the idea of it hidden away on shelves deep underground
sounds like something out of a spy thriller.
These days, the skill lies not in mining for the information you need,
but in panning the gold from the gravel – distinguishing the flood of
commentary, opinion, argument, axe-grinding and just plain crankiness from the
trickle of stuff that tells us something new. This we have tried to do in HTU: draw together the kind of
information that may appear as isolated news stories on aidsmap and elsewhere,
and synthesise, summarise and look for the significance in them.
We’ve always tried to do this for treatments, but in a world where the
big decisions and dilemmas in HIV are largely about more nebulous and difficult things like global funding priorities and
human behaviour, this feels more important than ever.
So, while HTU may be ending, the
type of features HTU carries will not
be and we plan to expand the range of news features we write for aidsmap. The
more wide-ranging and analytic pieces HTU
has carried will have a prominent place there.
We look forward to your continued attention and interest as readers of
an ever-developing aidsmap in this new world.
Best wishes,
Gus Cairns, Editor, HIV treatment update.