The advent of HAART has shattered accepted ways of thinking and acting in the face of the HIV epidemic, said Meurig Horton, a British man whose experience with protease inhibitors has led him to believe he is no longer a "rhinoceros."

Addressing the Thursday afternoon session on the implications of new treatments, Horton said HAART therapy has unravelled a 1980s consensus that AIDS was uniformly fatal. That "social contract," based in part on compassion, promoted tolerance of people with HIV infection, regarding them as members of a doomed species – "human rhinoceroses."

But with more people surviving longer with AIDS, at least in industrialised countries, community reactions to HIV and AIDS are changing, he said. There is a trend in the US, for example, to replace AIDS case reporting with named HIV reporting as a condition for getting government funding. Horton worries about the use and confidentiality of the information – old debates re-visited.

The "end of consensus" as Horton calls it, is also seen in other debates surrounding AIDS including criminalisation of transmission and views that gay men aren't practising safe sex. He says old debates about public health versus civil liberties need to be revived and new solutions designed in light of new treatments.

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