Princess Diana continued her HIV/AIDS

Princess Diana continued her HIV/AIDS advocacy work and spoke at the opening address of the 2nd International Conference on HIV in Children and Mothers in Edinburgh.

"By the year two thousand, only seven years from now - even the most conservative estimates predict there will be more than thirty million people worldwide with HIV - equivalent to more than half the population of the United Kingdom".Diana - Princess of Wales, 1993

In the UK in March, there were a large number of rather hysterical stories in the British press about the fact that a number of doctors in England had continued to practise medicine whilst knowing they were infected with HIV.¹³ The UK government responded by issuing new guidelines, according to which health care workers who believed that they had been exposed to HIV had to seek medical advice and testing. ¹⁴

Meanwhile scientists had found that HIV 'hides out' in lymph nodes and similar tissue early in the course of infection.¹⁵

“The virus lies concealed for a decade or so, quietly seeding the destruction of the immune system, the researchers found. The finding resoundingly solves a mystery of AIDS: where does the virus secrete itself during the decade or so after an initial infection when patients feel well and little virus can be detected in their blood?”¹⁶

In early April the ministers of health and finance from 39 countries met in Riga, Latvia, and launched an initiative to contain the spread of HIV in Central and Eastern European countries.¹⁷ During the Eighties, many countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the newly independent states, and the Russian Federation had introduced large-scale screening for HIV infection, with in excess of 20 million tests being carried out in the Russian Federation during 1993. One aspect of the Riga initiative was a refocusing of testing policies away from this mass screening and towards voluntary testing.¹⁸

A video of Dr R.P. Brettle talking in 1993 about AIDS treatment and the results of the Concorde trial.

The preliminary results were published of the large Anglo-French clinical trial of AZT known as Concorde.¹⁹ The results were interpreted as meaning that AZT was not after all a useful therapy for HIV positive people who had not developed symptoms.²⁰

In the UK the radio DJ and comedian Kenny Everett announced that he was HIV positive, as did Holly Johnson, former lead singer with the group Frankie goes to Hollywood.^{21 22}

The World Bank reviewed it activities against AIDS in Africa, and decided that AIDS should not dominate its agenda on population, health and nutrition issues. The World Bank believed that AIDS would have little demographic effect but recognised that it was a serious threat to health and economic development. With reference to blood screening, it was argued that this was costly and "might not be cost-effective under all circumstances".²³

The ninth International AIDS meeting was held in Berlin, Germany. The general feeling of the meeting was one of disappointment. The message conveyed by the people who attended was once again to put more money and effort into effective prevention of HIV and AIDS.

“Dr. James W. Curran, who heads the AIDS Programme at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said he left the meeting 'dispirited by the relentless assault of the virus'.”²⁴

At the beginning of the year the CDC had expanded the US definition of AIDS to include people with other opportunistic infections, as well as HIV infected adults with a CD4 count of less than 200. The expert epidemiology group of the European Centre for the Epidemiological Monitoring of AIDS together with the WHO's Regional Office for Europe accepted the inclusion of the additional indicator diseases but not the CD4 cell count criteria. European data collection on this basis began on July 1st.²⁵