Benjamin M. Wikler `03 has big plans.

The head of the Harvard AIDS Coalition, a student group he helped found earlier this year to lobby the U.S. government to fight the global AIDS epidemic, he is sticking around Cambridge this summer to plan the expansion of his group across the state and across the nation.

In a noon meeting in the bustling Science Center Greenhouse Café on May 24, Wikler met with other undergraduates and students from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Kennedy School of Government to organize this summer's activities--including a rally in New York City on June 23--and plan how students can make a difference in the fight against AIDS across the globe.

"Everything is picking up for next year to do a larger-scale mobilization," he says.

Both Wikler and other students involved in activism on the issue of AIDS in poor countries say the last school year has seen a marked increase in media attention to the issue and in action at the international level.

Wikler's group, founded by Wikler, John E. Raskin `03 and Andy D. Litinsky `04, has an e-mail list of about 200 people and represents just one of the ways in which students and faculty across the University have stepped up the campaign against AIDS in some of the world's poorest nations.

And although the University has been involved with scientific research on AIDS since the mid-1980s, this year has seen students take a new approach to fighting the disease where it strikes hardest.

Sachs' Crusade

The University has inserted itself in the fight against AIDS with its "Consensus Statement on Antiretroviral Treatment for AIDS in Poor Countries," which was signed by more than 100 Harvard faculty members. Stone Professor of International Trade Jeffrey D. Sachs '76 spearheaded the signature campaign.

The 26-page statement, released April 4, says, "We believe that on moral, health, social and economic grounds the international community should provide the scientific and financial leadership for a rapid scaling-up of AIDS treatment in the poorest and hardest-hit countries of the world."

It goes on to specifically mention Africa as a part of the world where AIDS treatment is most critically needed.

The statement cites a United Nations (U.N.) estimate that 24.5 million people in sub-Saharan African were infected with HIV at the end of 1999. The HIV virus is deadly if left untreated and the statement argues that the social fabric and economic situation of highly affected nations will further deteriorate if the virus is left untreated. The biggest challenge, the document states, is obtaining and distributing drugs to treat the virus in the hardest-hit areas.

"We can raise people from their deathbeds with these medications, " Professor of Medicine Bruce D. Walker said when the statement was first released. Walker was a co-signatory of the statement.

The statement put pressure on pharmaceutical companies to make their products less expensive so poor countries can afford them.