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Stephanie Nolen is the Africa correspondent for the Globe and Mail. She has reported from more than 40 countries around the world, including two dozen in Africa. She has a particular mandate to cover the impact of the HIV-AIDS pandemic in Africa.

Ms. Nolen, who is in Toronto covering the AIDS conference, will be on-line at 11 a.m. EDT on Thursday to answer your questions about the key issues at the conference, especially about Africa, the site of the worst AIDS epidemic. You can ask her a question now by using this story's comment function .

This week, she has written about male circumcision, HIV testing and solutions to save newborns. Last year, globeandmail.com produced AIDS in Africa: A turning point which was largely based on Ms. Nolen's work.

Her coverage of AIDS in Africa won the 2003 National Newspaper Award for International Reporting, and she won the award again a year later for reporting on the aftermath of Rwanda's genocide. She was also nominated for the 2004 award for Explanatory Journalism for work on AIDS. She was the recipient of both the 2003 and the 2004 Amnesty International Award for Human Rights Reporting, for reports from war zones in Uganda and Sudan. This year she was nominated a third time for the NNA in foreign reporting.

She has also reported on issues including the wars in Sudan, the political crisis in Zimbabwe and the peace process in Sierra Leone.

Her book "28: Stories of AIDS in Africa" will be published early next year.

Prior to her posting in Africa, she covered development issues and conflicts, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She now lives in Johannesburg, where she is making slow progress with lessons in isiZulu, her fifth language.

Editor's Note: globeandmail.com editors will read and allow or reject each question/comment. Comments/questions may be edited for length or clarity. HTML is not allowed. We will not publish questions/comments that include personal attacks on Globe journalists or participants in these discussions, that make false or unsubstantiated allegations, that purport to quote people or reports where the purported quote or fact cannot be easily verified, or questions/comments that include vulgar language or libellous statements. Preference will be given to readers who submit questions/comments using their full name and home town, rather than a pseudonym.

Shane Dingman, globeandmail.com: Hi Stephanie, thanks for joining us to take questions from the readers of globeandmail.com. Several people have written in to express their heartfelt thanks for your work on HIV/AIDS, noting not just your skill as a writer but how reading your stories has changed their lives. Just as many ask the question "Is there any hope?" Coming out of the conference, though it's not over yet, what signs have hope have you seen?

Stephanie Nolen: Thank you, Shane, and my thanks to all the readers who are following our conference coverage. In answer to your first question, the first point, I suppose, is that with 42 million people living with HIV-AIDS around the world, to say that there is no hope is to pretty much write them off, which is absurd. It's certainly true that this conference, which marks 25 years since the first AIDS cases were reported, serves as a sobering reminder that this disease has proved to be, as UNAIDS head Peter Piot was saying yesterday, the worst humanity has ever faced. But every time I attend one of these events I am reminded first of all that there is, all the time, incremental progress - we know more about HIV than we do any other microbe and while we are still a decade away from a vaccine, real progress is being made on a microbicide and some other prevention technologies. We have encouraging new data about the protective effect of circumcision. We know how to keep kids from getting HIV, although the resources aren't yet being marshalled actually to do it. And most important, at a conference like this one sees the vast array of incredibly committed and bright people who are working full tilt on stopping AIDS. Personally, I'm always most struck by the scientists and clinicians and care workers from the developing world who are mounting amazing responses to AIDS with very little support. If they can do what they do, so far from the spotlight, I don't see how we could question whether there is hope.

Janice Cooper from West Kootenays, BC Canada writes: Ms Nolen, in view of the numbers of people, including children, who are impacted by HIV/AIDS in Africa, the depletion of the work force due to illness and death and the famine situation resulting from that lack of labour to plant and harvest sufficient crops, my question is this: Is there hope or despair in the affected population? It seems that it would be extremely difficult to hold on to hope for a better tomorrow, when their present is so difficult, and their future, if they are able to imagine one, would seem to be bleak as well.

Stephanie Nolen: Thanks, Janice. Assuming you're asking specifically about Africa, let me start by saying that I'm always a bit wary of talking about the continent or its people like one place or group - sub-Saharan Africa is 53 countries and HIV-AIDS infection rates range from 1 or 2 per cent in some to 43 per cent in others - and the impact of AIDS ranges a great deal within countries as well. All of that said, I can tell you that the disease has of course had a crippling impact on the nations that are most affected. People in countries such as Zambia or Lesotho live with a level of loss that I think we as Canadians can hardly begin to fathom - yesterday I was talking to a friend from Kenya who mentioned, in passing, that there is no room left in his mother's yard because they've just buried a 7th sibling there. And I think one of the worst things about AIDS is that it just never stops - you scramble to find the money to get medical treatment for a sister or a husband who falls sick, and then it's not enough and that person dies and you go into debt to pay for the funeral and then you have a couple more orphans to try to find school fees for and you don't get a crop in the ground because you're dealing with all this and then there's no food and you can't go to the city to look for work because you're nursing someone else - there is no respite. All of that said, it's also true that life, as they say, goes on - your daughter graduates from high school, and your son gets married, and there are things to celebrate. Your neighbours pitch in to help nurse the sick or pay for that funeral, your community responds as best it can. I would say that the predominant sense in most of the communities I visit is that people struggle to understand why this absolutely catastrophic thing has befallen them, and they wonder why the world pays so little attention - but you wake up in the morning and of course you carry on.

Ross Smith from Toronto Canada writes: Dear Stephanie, Welcome home; thank you so much for the intelligent and compelling writing you've provided us over the past few years. It has immeasurably added to my appreciation for the scope of the pandemic and the incredible efforts of individuals and agencies in African countries to combat it and cope with its immense impact. Although the conference this week, as South Africa's Mark Heywood has noted, has focused considerable attention on public figures, such as Gates, Clinton and Harper, I'd like to think that their presence (or lack thereof) is not the most significant of events from AIDS 2006. The preventive measures covered by Dr. Ramji in Tuesday's plenary session were, for me, most inspiring of hope. Now that you're back in Toronto, I wonder if you could share your perspectives on what the most important issues have been, or will be, which have emerged from the conference this week, particularly through the lens of your experiences in Africa. Thanks again. I remain humbled by your work and commitment, and look forward to your book. Ross

Stephanie Nolen: Thanks for the kind words, Ross. I would say that for most of the 23,000 people at this event, the politics are far from the most important part - although you might not get that sense from the newspaper ... Certainly there is considerable excitement about the new preventive technologies and interventions being discussed here - and it was great that Dr. Ramjee, from South Africa, had so many clinical trials to discuss - that's a difference from past years, where at most there were one or two. There's some new information on drugs and drug combinations too - no earth-shattering breakthroughs, but slow, steady discoveries about how to do treatment better, with fewer side-effects. I am struck by two things, though - one is that there seems to be a tendency to talk about the drug access issue as if it's solved.

Today 6.8 million in low and middle income countries require anti-retrovirals, and at the end of June, 1.6 million of them were getting them. Seventy per cent of that unmet need is in Africa: the reality is that most sick people still don't have the drugs, and governments don't have the money or, maybe more important at this point, the health workers and the labs to deliver them. Drug access is only getting more complicated as changes at the WTO on patents come into effect. But drug access has really slipped off the agenda - perhaps due to an understandable human desire to focus on the new and the hopeful, not this same old intractable problem. Secondly, I also feel that in the buzz around the politicians and the new technologies, some of the important underlying issues are being missed: people in Africa, in particular, are vulnerable to HIV because of poverty and equity issues, and you can't fix those with a pill. But again, they're old problems that are incredibly hard to fix, so we'd all rather discuss the clinical trials.

C.C. from Scarborough, ON writes: What do delegates from Africa want to get out of this conference?

Stephanie Nolen:Delegates from Africa, I think, often get the most out of gatherings like this because they have the fewest opportunities to interact with people working in their areas in other countries. African scientists, like all the others, are looking for the opportunity to learn about the state-of-the-art in terms of care, treatment, and research - compared to Canadians working in AIDS research, they have smaller travel and conference budgets, smaller journal budgets, no wireless internet bringing in the latest news. So they can gather quite a lot at an event like this. Activists and community care workers want to network and hear about what's working, and what's not, in other countries. On Tuesday night, I had the chance to eavesdrop on an amazing conversation among a group of women, a Swazi, a Nigerian, a Zambian and a Burundian, who were all waiting at a buffet, about what their different countries are offering pregnant women with HIV: within moments the Nigerian, whose country offers the best services, was coaching the others on how they should lobby their governments to improve care for pregnant women. I don't think any African delegate has any illusions about new funding committments emerging.

Ajit Khare from Mississauga Canada writes: Hi Stephanie Empowerment of women is considered as the key to win battle against AIDS.However if we want to make women, living in the rural areas of Africa or India, independent of their partners then we must give them occupational training and skills that will enable them to make a decent living independent of their partners. Only a financially independent woman will have the self respect and dignity necessary to live with HIV, to undergo treatment and to care for her children. What we need, along with drugs and universal access to treatment, is the microfinance for women. What do you think?

Stephanie Nolen: Thanks, Ajit. The need for women to have control over their sexuality has been a big theme here, with the buzz around microbicides (a female controlled prevention method aimed aimed at women who cannot, for cultural reasons, convince their partners to use condoms) - but lost in that discussion is the fact that what imperils those women is their lack of financial autonomy: a woman can't make her husband use a condom because if she insists he will throw her out and she or their children will be left with nothing - so just having the microbicide is not going to be enough. I think microfinance has had some successes, but I've also seen it be a crashing failure in many places, or have only the most limited impact. It's one of those interventions that development and aid agencies like to seize on as a solution; sounds good on paper, often goes off the rail in implementation, and ultimately can have only a finite impact. Skills training is important, but education has to come before both those things. School fees keep girls and young women out of school: a key development intervention is abolition of school fees - which, in practical terms, means a country such as Canada supporting a government such as Lesotho to remove the fees and hire the teachers and buy the books and build the schools. I think that holds more promise than micro-finance. Educated women have more control not only over their sexual and reproductive health but also many more options for financial autonomy.

Steve Berube from Ottawa writes: Why do the governments bare most of the costs of supplying the medicines to combat AIDS yet it's the pharmaceuticals reaping the profits?

Stephanie Nolen: Steve: well, that's a thorny question. The pharmaceutical industry will say, of course, that it's a business, not a charity. Developing new drugs costs millions of dollars in research and development, and no one is going to do that work if they can't sell the products they develop. The question is what is a reasonable level of profit: AIDS activists say it's fine for those companies to make money off their products. But they need to do it in the developed world, where people can afford to pay, and not in Malawi. The pharmaceutical industry tends to operate on a Gucci model, as they say, making huge profits off a small market, rather than a Coke model - tiny profit, huge market - and AIDS activists say that's a mistake. There's a vast market for AIDS, TB and malaria drugs in Africa, for example, if drug companies were willing to make their product widely available at a much smaller profit margin. Currently Africa is just 1.5 per cent of the global pharmaceutical market. It's interesting to note that the Indian generic drug firms that are currently supplying most of the AIDS drugs in the developing world are also for-profit companies - they charge $132 a year per patient for a drug regiment that is $10,000 in Canada - but they are still making a profit.

big guy from High Park writes: I'd like to know your views on Canada's response to aids in Africa

Stephanie Nolen: Canada took some early leadership with committments to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and to the International AIDS Vaccine Research Initiative and the International Partnership for Microbicides. I think a lot of people are surprised that the government has not made any further announcements this week, on the occasion of the conference, about a continuation of those committments or any new contributions. On the whole, I would say that Canada's contribution has been fairly limited, given the country's level of prosperity - what I see in Africa is pretty piecemeal, very little bold thinking about how Canada as a nation can best help, or creatively spend its resources.

I've been struck by how profoundly insulted delegates from other countries seem to be that Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not attend.

All of that said, I think Canadians as people have an unusually high level of awareness of the pandemic and level of engagement with trying to help, compared to most other developed countries.

Murray Reiss from Salt Spring Island Canada writes: hi Stephanie -- Thank you so much for your reporting and your clear-eyed answers today. We hear so much about the grandmothers in Africa, and how crucial their role has been in keeping their often-orphaned grandchildren alive, and I'm wondering -- what about the grandfathers? Do we just not hear about them? Are they not involved? What?

Stephanie Nolen: Murray - a very good question. In plenty of communities, the grandfathers are in fact involved. But two things bring our attention to grandmothers, I think: one is that, in many cases, the men have died. They were migrant labourers or truckers or soldiers, they got infected and died (often, of course, leaving their wives also infected.) The second reason, if I may risk a sweeping generalization, is that women have really stepped up to the plate in a way men haven't, in many communities. In part, that reflects the fact that the work the grannies do is "women's work" - nursing the sick and caring for children and farming. They inheirit the kids. So even if their husbands are present, and many are, the real burden of labour falls on women. If I think about the group of grannies I know best, in the South African township of Alexandra, at least half have been widowed, another quarter were abandoned by their partners, who ditched when things got hard and expensive, and the rest are getting some level of support from a husband or partner.

Shane Dingman, globeandmail.com: That, unfortunately, is all the time Stephanie has, she is running right back out to continue her coverage. Thanks again to our readers, for joining us for this important discussion, and special thanks to Stephanie for taking the time. Do you have any final thoughts?

Stephanie Nolen: My thanks to all the readers who sent questions and I'm sorry I don't have time for all of them. I would just like to add this: I've had grumpy letters from a lot of readers this week calling the conference a "waste" and a lot of hot air, and I think they're missing the point: no, there won't be the announcement we'd all like to hear about a cure or a vaccine. But AIDS as a disease is so destructive and so frustrating, in the way that it eludes solutions, that is vitally important to keep attention focused on it, with an event like this every two years. This conference gives the many people all over the world working in the field - from the heroin addicts in Afghanistan to the grannies in Zambia to the sex workers in Brazil - a chance to take stock of what's working and what's not and what else they can try. There are real benefits to bringing these people all together that couldn't be had any other way. And it's all pretty inspiring to watch.

Once again, thanks to all of you for reading.