Conference boycott

Government restrictions on entry of people living with HIV in the USA prompt a boycott of the 6th International AIDS Conference, held in San Francisco. Several international NGOs – including Oxfam, the British Medical Association, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies and Gay Men’s Health Crisis – decline to attend the conference, the theme of which is, ironically, ‘AIDS in the 90s: from Science to Policy’. The International AIDS Society, which organised the conference, decides to move it away from the USA after this, only returning in 2012 after the policy has been scrapped.