Dear members and friends of the SHCS,

For a long time it has been a goal to also directly inform participants of the cohort, their friends and families and other interested people about news of interest for them. Now, we have created the SHCS participants and community webpage in Italian, French and German with a special entry on the homepage (direct links deutsch, français, italiano).

Interested people can subscribe for the newsletter that we will send out also in the three languages sporadically. Of course, we will not report on every paper but pick the ones that will be of interest to the community. The idea is also to comment on important topics in HIV in general, or maybe sometimes to put something into context that was not correctly reported by the media. Anyway, we will see how this will evolve.

We have also added the links to the respective centers, to the site of the Positivrat and to the BAG and a contact form if patients have specific questions or comments concerning the cohort. The overall aim of this site is to more directly involve interested people and to create an interactive platform.

Please inform your patients about this possibility.

With this step we also fulfil a point raised by the reviewers of the last SNF evaluation to more directly involve HIV-infected individuals.

At this point, I would like to very much thank Danièle Perraudin and Lukas Humbel for continuously improving our webpage, and Dominique Braun for writing all the short summaries on the SHCS publications.

Kind regards,
Huldrych Günthard