Guido Poli, from the University Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milan, made a plea (link in Italian) on behalf of several supervisors of projects involved in the National Research Programme on HIV/AIDS. Subjects of this call are the Italian Prime Minister, the Minister of Health, the Minister of University and Scientific Research, and the President of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), to whom the subscribers ask not to remove HIV and AIDS from Government’s agenda. The elimination of the already modest funds for this research would likely result in the dispersion of a human capital of knowledge and international credibility that our country has built with years of competitiveness in this challenging field of health research.
Such a plea follows the open letter (link in Italian) wrote on June 21st by the Italian League for the Struggle against AIDS (LILA) and the no-profit organization Nadir, worried by the lack of references to HIV and AIDS related issues from the programmatic speech held by the Minister of Health, few days before.