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 Among them was Joep Lange, who researched the condition for more
than 30 years and was considered a giant in the field, admired for
his tireless advocacy for access to affordable AIDS drugs for HIV
positive patients living in poor countries.
"Global health and the AIDS response have lost one of their great
leaders," Peter Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene &
Tropical Medicine and a former executive director of UNAIDS, told
Reuters in London.
"Joep Lange was one of the most creative AIDS researchers, a
humanist, and tireless organizer, dedicated to his patients and to
defeating AIDS in the poorest countries."
The United Nations AIDS program, UNAIDS, said it feared "some of the
finest academics, health-care workers and activists in the AIDS
response may have perished" on the plane.
"Professor Lange was a leading light in the field since the early
days of HIV and worked unceasingly to widen access to antiretroviral
medicines around the world," it said.
As many as 100 people heading to the AIDS 2014 conference in
Melbourne were on the doomed flight, Fairfax Media reported,
including Lange, a former president of the International AIDS
Society (IAS) which organizes the event.
"The UNAIDS family is in deep shock..."The deaths of so many
committed people working against HIV will be a great loss for the
AIDS response," said Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS.
The conference, due to start on Sunday, features former U.S.
President Bill Clinton among its keynote speakers and is expecting
around 12,000 participants.
The IAS said it was still working with authorities to confirm the
number of delegates on the flight and would go ahead with the
conference as planned.
GREAT FIGHTER
Peers paid tribute to Lange, a Dutch professor of medicine at the
Academic Medical Center at the University of Amsterdam.
The Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 was en route from Amsterdam to
Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down on Thursday by a surface-to-air
missile in an area of eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels
have been fighting government forces.
Lange pioneered access to key AIDS medicines in poor countries,
including combination drugs to control HIV and antiretroviral
medicines to prevent transmission of the virus from mothers to their
babies.
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Robin Weiss, a professor of viral oncology at University College
London, compared Lange to Jonathan Mann, a key figure in the early
fight against HIV/AIDS who was killed along with his wife and fellow
AIDS researcher Mary Lou Clements-Mann on a Swissair flight to
Geneva in 1998. "Not since the loss of Jonathan Mann and his
wife...has the HIV/AIDS research community suffered such a great
loss," he said.
Lange's colleague Jaap Goudsmit said: "He was an activist, he was
there from the beginning, from...when we were seeing young people
dying very fast and no one knew why.
"He was a fighter for getting treatment to everyone who needed it
and as early as possible to lower the spread of infection. His
clinical contribution was enormous."
The World Health Organization (WHO) said media spokesman Glenn
Thomas was among those on board Flight MH17.
Gregory Hartl, a WHO spokesman, said Thomas had been with the
organization for more than a decade and "will be remembered for his
ready laugh and passion for public health."
"He will be greatly missed by those who had the opportunity to know
him and work with him. He leaves behind his partner Claudio and his
twin sister Tracey."
Thomas, a British national, was in charge of promoting the WHO's
report issued last week that said five key groups including gay men
had stubbornly high rates of HIV.
(Writing and reporting by Kate Kelland in LONDON and Stephanie
Nebehay in GENEVA, additional reporting by and Jane Wardell and
Lincoln Feast in SYDNEY.; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Stephen
Coates)
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