Dear readers,

A warm welcome to our renewed edition of ARV4IDUs.

We would like to apologise for the gap from the last issue, which is related to a combination of both personal and organisational issues. We hope this issue is still useful as an overview from much of 2009 and we will now aim to return to our previous quarterly schedule. We would like to thank Open Society Institute for their decision to renew funding and their patience with our timeline.

Even if the information and studies on this particularly difficult, politically and legally challenging topic is still underrepresented in the majority of conferences, there were several studies worth taking a look at since the beginning of the year.

In this issue, you will find a coverage of three major conferences: The Conference of Retrovirus and Opportunistic Infections in Montreal, Canada (February 2009), The International Harm Reduction Conference in Bangkok (April 2009) and The IAS Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Cape Town (July 2009).

In our next issue, we intend to cover the sessions of the EECAAC conference in Moscow (October 2009) and the European AIDS Clinical Society Conference in Cologne (November 2009).

We always like to encourage new writers and reviewers who would like to contribute to future issues. This can include research reports and overview articles.

If you would like to contribute to future issues or have news to include, please email: arv4idus@i-base.org.uk.

ARV4IDUs is produced in English and Russian and is distributed by email and published on the i-Base website.

ARV4IDUs is produced as a supplement to the i-Base HIV Treatment Bulletin (HTB) and has been supported by a grant from the International Harm Reduction Development Programme of the Open Society Institute (www.soros.org).

Thank you for reading!

The editorial team