Go to www.projinf.org, and select 'Report from Retrovirus Conference'. Select "Slides 1-10," "Slides 11-20," etc. to hear the audio while the correct slides are automatically displayed. The slides can also be viewed separately on this site, but they are most useful with the spoken presentation.

Searching the Abstracts for a Particular Drug, Condition, Other Topic, or Author

Go to the official conference site, www.retroconference.org, and select 'Conference Abstracts'. Click on the blank line, type the word you are looking for, and click 'Search'.

Hint on searching the official conference abstracts: If you are searching for an author, always enter the last name with an asterisk after it. The asterisk means to look for any words beginning with the letters, no matter what comes later. The asterisk is necessary (at this time) because superscripts are often used to identify an author's institution, and the sequence number used is included in the index as part of the author's name. We have reported this problem to the organizations maintaining the site, and it may be corrected in the future.

Related Stories from the GayToday Archive: World AIDS Day Alert: How to Save Lives! New Results with Hepatitis B, HIV The Retroviruses Conference Related Sites: AIDS Treatement News GayToday does not endorse related sites.

Hearing Conference Lectures; Viewing Posters

The official conference site has provided audio of some of the major lectures given at the conference; go to www.retroconference.org and select 'Hear the Lectures' or 'Hear the Symposia'. The audio quality is usually excellent, and the slides being discussed, if any, appear automatically on the screen.

The conference also photographed posters, and will put some of them on the site, with presenters' permission. None are online at the time of this writing, so we do not know how well the information will transmit. (Posters not designed for the Web can be hard to read, especially if they use widely varying sizes of type.)

Much of the new information at the conference was presented in "slide sessions"--which are different from the "lectures" and "symposia" (some of which also used slides). No "slide sessions" are on the Web at this time, although some were recorded for Web transmission.

Sometimes there will be difficulties setting up one's computer system to receive the audio transmissions.

Finding Mainstream News Reports of Treatment Developments

The most complete source for mainstream news media reports about AIDS, including treatments, is AEGIS (AIDS Education Global Information System), www.aegis.com, which now has about 700,000 searchable articles and abstracts. Many of these items are wire service or other news reports; others are technical abstracts, for example new items being added to AIDSLINE.

At the site, select 'Search', and follow the instructions provided.

There is no way to restrict searches to reports from a particular conference.

Finding Expert Commentary and Discussion on a Topic

This site requires a one-time registration process, which takes about 5 minutes and is free; you need to make up a user name and password and save them for later use if needed. (Your computer can save this information and log you on automatically in the future; but save your name and password anyway, in case you want to use the site from a different computer.)

Two different searches are provided: either a search of the Retroviruses conference summaries only, or of the entire Medscape site.

To search the Retroviruses summaries, select 'Conference Summaries' under HIV/AIDS Resources', then select 'The 6th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections'. About two thirds of the way down the page, under 'Conference Summaries Search', enter the word or words you are looking for.

Hint: The summaries retrieved are often quite long. To avoid having to skim through one when you are looking for a particular topic only, use the search function in your browser (usually under the Edit menu) to find a drug name or other important word you are looking for. This is a local search which does not involve the Internet, but only looks through the page which is showing on your screen. A few browsers do not have this local search function (including the stripped-down Internet Explorer provided with the new Windows CE portable machines).

You can also use the extended search box which appears at the bottom of most Medscape pages; it allows a free search on AIDSLINE, MEDLINE, or other databases, as well as the Medscape site.

You can enter a date range when searching the Medscape site, but only after having done a search, when you are offered an opportunity to refine it. Check that the starting date is '0' (meaning now), unless you want to retrieve older articles only.

In addition to news coverage from Reuters (organized by day or by topic), this site features three perspective reports written by JAMA correspondents, and two extensive expert essays: Basic Science, by Alan Landay, Ph.D., and Opportunistic Infections by William Powderly, M.D.

The HIV4site dozens of articles on various retrovirus issues

Seven technical reports (as of February 17) cover aspects of antiretroviral therapy, origin of HIV-1, and review and summary of the late-breaker session.

At press time 15 different reports were available in English and French. They focus on clinical issues such as discontinuing PCP prophylaxis, "protease sparing" combinations, and nevirapine-induced methadone withdrawal.

Short summaries written by physicians (at press time, 16 reports) cover mainly poster discussion sessions, which are oral presentations of a few related abstracts; topics include treatment naive patients, heavily pre-treated patients, immunology and pathogenesis, adherence, resistance testing, metabolic complications, and antiretroviral agents.