Among more than 100 scientists and campaigners flying to the international Aids conference in Melbourne on board flight MH17 was a former leader in the field, Joep Lange from the Netherlands, who was travelling with his partner, Jacqueline van Tongeren.
Lange was president of the International Aids Society, which runs the meeting, from 2002 to 2004, spanning the two-year interval between the Barcelona and Bangkok conferences, where drug treatment for all those with HIV around the world were top of the agenda. The Aids pandemic threw scientists such as Lange into the political maelstrom and many of them took on campaigning and political roles alongside their research.
Lange, 60, was professor of medicine at the academic medical centre of the University of Amsterdam and specialised in drugs to treat HIV infection and prevent people developing Aids. He was senior scientific adviser to the International Antiviral Therapy Evaluation Centre in Amsterdam.
Having helped to develop drugs for HIV, he was in the forefront of efforts by the scientific community to make them widely available to a population in the developing world who could not possibly pay the very high prices drug companies asked. Around the time of the 2000 Durban Aids conference, when the controversy around access was at its height, a three-drug combination cost $10,000 per patient per year.
In 2001, Lange founded the PharmAccess Foundation, which worked to get access to the drugs for those in poor countries and he continued as its chair until his death. He was also co-director of an HIV research collaboration based in Thailand.
The director of the Wellcome Trust, Dr Jeremy Farrar, paid tribute to him and the others in the HIV community who died on the plane. He said: “I am deeply saddened that Joep Lange, his partner Jacqueline van Tongeren, and other colleagues from the World Health Organisation and the HIV research community are reported to be among those killed in the MH17 disaster.
“Joep was a great clinical scientist, and a great friend of the Wellcome Trust who has long been a valued adviser. He was also a personal friend. He is a great loss to global health research. The thoughts and sympathies of all of us at the Trust are with his family and other families who have lost loved ones in this tragedy.”
Emeritus professor of viral oncology at UCL, Prof Robin Weiss, said: “Not since the loss of Jonathan Mann and his wife on the sabotaged Swiss Air flight to Geneva 17 years ago has the HIV/Aids research community suffered such a great loss.”
The associate director for Africa at the UK-based International HIV/Aids Alliance, Shaun Mellors, talked of the shock and sadness of everybody in the HIV community. “This is a profound collective loss to science, to research, to medicine and to public health and our deepest condolences are with their loved ones,” he said. “They spent their lives fighting for the lives of others and we pledge to continue their important work.
“I first met Joep in 1995 when I was working for the Global Network of People Living with HIV (GNP+). I was young and an inexperienced activist who had moved from South Africa to take on this challenging new role as the executive director and in Joep I found a mentor and ally. He was a powerful advocate for treatment access, fought hard to ensure that people living with HIV were involved and included, was not afraid to share his views even if they were against the establishment, and he had a wicked and enjoyable sense of humour.
“He taught me a lot about equity and politics, and also about being a humble and effective individual. He introduced me to the world of clinical science, where I did not have to be afraid of it, but rather question and engage with it. His commitment to the work that he was doing is something that we all need to continue – because he would expect it of us, nothing less.”
There was shock, outrage and distress at the Melbourne conference, which officially opens on Sunday but is already running sessions.
“There’s a huge feeling of sadness here, people are in floods of tears in the corridors,” Clive Aspin, a HIV researcher who attended the pre-conference plenary session in Sydney, told Guardian Australia. “These people were the best and the brightest, the ones who had dedicated their whole careers to fighting this terrible virus. It’s devastating.”
The director of the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories, Prof Richard Boyd, said he was “gutted” by the losses. “There were some serious HIV leaders on that plane,” he said. “This will have ramifications globally because whenever you lose a leader in any field, it has an impact. That knowledge is irreplaceable.”
“Truly beautiful, inspiring, committed, smart and compassionate people have been brutally taken away from us,” said Murdo Bijl, a Dutch Aids advocate who knew many of those on board MH17. “The world and the Aids field will miss these brilliant doctors, advocates, researchers and friends.”
Glenn Thomas, a senior communications officer at the World Health Organisation, based in Geneva, who had specialised in the big infectious diseases – Aids, TB and malaria – was one of an estimated 108 people headed for the conference on the plane. Thomas, 46, was British and had worked for the BBC before moving to Switzerland.
Other names mentioned include Martine de Schutter, executive coordinator of the campaigning group Aids Action Europe and Pim de Kuijer, a Dutch Aids activist and parliamentary lobbyist, who spent time as an intern with the MEP Lousewies van der Laan. In a statement, Van der Laan said: “Pim believed in understanding between countries, the rule of law and equality for all and fought for his values through his work and his political activities. Let’s try to live up to his legacy and work even harder towards a peaceful world.”