loosely) on the vital role that HIV positive people play in prevention and in our collective efforts to minimise the transmission of the epidemic.

Beatrice Nabulya, from our very own Positively Women, summed it up well. She said that people with HIV are still dealing with stigma, blame and isolation, and until we give all people, including people with HIV, the skills and support to deal with negotiating sex safely, we will never find an end to the epidemic. For HIV positive women in particular, a microbicide could well be a vital tool in what Bea called "normalising sex as a fundamental human right of all human beings, and one that should not need to be given up if you get an HIV positive diagnosis". A microbicide could potentially take away from an HIV positive woman the terror of revealing her status before she's ready to by having to insist on a condom.
Microbicides are an HIV prevention tool that will be primarily female controlled, but the potential for gay men also to use microbicides is enormous too. Groups such as the Gay Men's Health Network are lobbying to make sure that microbicide research includes their effectiveness in anal sex - something heterosexuals do too. At the moment, nothing is in clinical trial about rectal use, it's all vaginal use, but the Population Council in the USA is apparently looking at a rectal use clinical trial of Carraguard.
As one delegate summed up:
"If you're not part of the solution to HIV, you're part of the problem. We have to be thinking long term in order to combat HIV in our generation and future generations".
We need urgent funds, political will, advocacy and education to defeat this most

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devastating global epidemic. A female-controlled method of HIV prevention will go a long way to contributing to the fight.