U.S. Cuts Number of Delegates to World AIDS Meeting

Administration Cites Need For Savings; Critics Say Move Will Hurt Conference

The U.S. government will send only one-quarter as many people to the huge international AIDS conference starting Sunday in Bangkok as it sent to the last one in Barcelona.

The decision to cut attendance, which comes as the Bush administration is rolling out its five-year, $15 billion global AIDS treatment plan, was reached long after many government scientists had made plans to attend the conference, which is held every two years. Dozens of scientific presentations were withdrawn, about 50 will be published only as summaries and not presented publicly, and dozens of meetings -- many designed to train Third World AIDS researchers and foster international collaboration -- were canceled.

The move, which officials say is to save money, is interpreted by many AIDS experts as payback for the heckling of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson at the last AIDS conference and further evidence of a "go-it-alone" attitude in the administration's global AIDS program.

The cutbacks affect only the HHS, home to the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- the two powerhouses of U.S. AIDS research. In 2002, the department spent $3.6 million on the AIDS conference and sent 236 people. This year it will spend $500,000 and send 50.

Other Cabinet-level departments with AIDS programs -- Defense, Veterans Affairs and State -- are not cutting back their participation in the Bangkok conference.

"We received no directions to do that. In fact, we received the opposite," said Col. Deborah L. Birx, an Army AIDS researcher. "Because our work is primarily international, our general encouraged us to extend the relationships."

William A. Pierce, spokesman for the HHS, said the department's decision reflected a policy of reducing travel to scientific meetings "put in place quite a while ago. This is not exclusive to this conference -- this is for all international conferences. A lot of it was simply looking at expenses." The NIH and the CDC were notified in March of the limits on their Bangkok delegations.

The U.S. government's diminished presence is being greeted in some quarters with chagrin, amazement and disgust.

"It's unfair, it's a pity, it's also a bit awkward," said Joep Lange, a Dutch scientist who is president of the International AIDS Society and a co-chairman of the conference.

"The largest group in the world in terms of AIDS expertise comes from the U.S., so it's important this expertise is at the conference," said Peter Piot, head of UNAIDS, the program run by the United Nations and the World Bank. The reduced attendance "is a big deal for the quality of the conference," he said.