Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-04-24 - 4:28 p.m.

A busy 2 days or so.

Tuesday afternoon I drove up to Balham for a Kwase-Kwaza conference with Dr Chatterton - good fun as usual - Peter is always full of ideas and we identified a number of enhancements to the site. Also arranged with Trish Sibbons - still recovering from the bug she got is SA - when we could meet up again.

Then I dodged the congestion charge to drive across to Bloomsbury to have a meal in an Indian restaurant with Nick Sinclair-Brown. Nick kindly let me sleep in his spare bedroom. I woke early - congestion charge dodging again - and drove up to Royston to have breakfast with Rob and Wendy while I worked out how I was going make my way into Cambridge.

Wendy suggested the park and ride by the M11 which was a great idea and so I was at the Geography faculty building with good time to spare - time to have coffee and croissant in the rather hippy little cafe on Downing St.

The seminar on AIDS Education and Africa was crowded (excellent!) and amazingly good value considering it was absolutely free. It had been organised because people across the University were rightly concerned with the issue and wanted an opportunity to catch up with latest views.

Some of the presentations were purely information - none the worse for that - one wants an authoritative view on how the numbers are going and also on the issues surrounding the production of a vaccine.

There was a review of the evidence of the impact of the AIDS epidemic on food production. Per capita food production in Africa hasnt changed in 30 years unlike all the other continents. Is AIDS a factor - almost certainly even though the evidence is quite hard to interpret. Are there going to impacts for the rest of this century - in the judgement of the UK expert on the subject - yes, although he stressed that he was going way beyond the evidence.

In the afternoon there were a couple of papers on the efficacy of using the education system to spread info and change attitudes to sexual health in Sub Saharan Africa. It just shows how out of touch we are - to us it seems to be the obvious answer. But the researchers who had been to look at the issues deployed a lot of evidence to show that it wasnt going to work - much of it very depressing.

The big issue of the day was about Uganda. Had this country really turned the AIDS pandemic round in the early 1990s or was it all just propganada. If it had succeeded where all the other countries had failed - why was this.

A guy from Imperial presented his PhD research which said that the success wasnt as great as had been claimed. But the Geography Dept in Cambs kept its big guns til last and deployed some really persuasive evidence that things had been almost out of control circa 1990 and that they had won the battle in the 1990s. This was good news in itself but in the face of all the really depressing material - even better.

Basically following the end of the 1986 Civil War, the new Ugandan Govt had made a national priority out of tackling AIDS and had managed to build a concensus of all kinds of organisations to engage with the problem. One of their big triumphs was to bring the issue out into the open and get past the problem of stigma - they had also made care of AIDS sufferers a national priority. All kinds of NGOs and faith-based organisations had been part of the coalition.

I found this very encouraging - of course - it means that the kind of intervention that we are supporting on www.kwase-kwaza.org is part of a potential solution in South Africa. I would expect that David Beetge who has been working in the area since the early 90s was able to feed off the Ugandan experience.

I was pretty tired after over 7 hours concentration on all this key data and analysis. Fortunately Rob and Wendy were able to put me up for the night.

When I was in Cambridge I got a call from Geoff at work - his daughter is doing European Marketing at Surrey and had an Easter economics essay that she wanted some advice on. I suggested she mail me where she had got to - I downloaded the document on Wendy's Apple and suggested some extra lines of enquiries. Basically it seemed to me to be about the differential impact of exchange rate shifts caused by an interest rate cuts on different commercial sectors.

Rob woke me up early today and we drove down to Royston Station - I parked in the station and then got the train to Kings X and tube down to the Thistle Hotel in Victoria. Stefan - another colleague was there - we were doing a seminar on the National Workforce Development Strategy.

But we started by talking about Wishbone Ash who Stefan has seen live at the classic Black Country rock venue on Sunday night. He said that the two lead trick sounded as good as ever. We went on to discuss Slightly All the Time and the sound of Emmerson's Hammond B3 when he played Fillmore East in 1967. We agreed that we both liked the Jimmy Smith Oliver Neslon arranged big band albums of 3/4 years earlier.

There was a very strong inititial presentation from a guy from Warwick Uni to start. Stefan and I agreed that this deserved a really decent meal on the corporate credit card before we were all very much older.

Its a living I suppose.

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