Like generals locked in strategic debate about how to prosecute a war where no end is in sight, campaigners in the global AIDS pandemic broadly divide into two camps.
On one side, there are the "treaters," those who demand action for providing precious antiretroviral drugs to people with the AIDS virus. This would save lives, prevent new additions to the tragic roll call of children orphaned by AIDS and ease the costs to struggling economies inflicted by AIDS deaths.
On the other side are the "preventers": those who, while agreeing treatment access is vital, also call for money and energies to be focussed more on preventing HIV infections in the first place.
For the last six years, the treaters have driven the AIDS agenda.
Their efforts have resulted in a big influx of funds and price concessions by Big Pharma. Anti-HIV drugs are at last getting to where they are needed most: poorly, highly-infected countries, including in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to two-thirds of the nearly 39 million people with HIV.
But the International AIDS Conference here, the 16th since AIDS embarked on its murderous march 25 years ago, has signalled that a swing of the pendulum is now on the way, back in favour of prevention.
And a key part of this will be to help and empower women, whose plight is increasingly at the heart of what some experts contend is the deadliest pandemic since the Black Death in 14th-century Europe.
"The most vexing and intolerable dimension of the pandemic is what is happening to women," said the UN's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis.
"It's the one area of HIV/AIDS which leaves me feeling most helpless and most enraged. Gender inequality is driving the pandemic, and we will never subdue the gruesome force of AIDS until the rights of women become paramount in the struggle."
The conference identified these key prongs on the prevention front:
-- MICROBICIDES: With the help of Bill Gates' cheque book, the race is on to develop a vaginal cream that would block transmission of HIV to women during intercourse.
The first such gel could be introduced as early as 2009, provided trials go well. If it works and is safe, women would at last get the means to protect themselves from sex with an infected man, rather than depend on his willingness to wear a condom.
-- CIRCUMCISION: Another highly promising track. Two big trials are underway in Uganda and Kenya which seek to confirm the outcome of a study in South Africa that suggests circumcised men are 60-percent less likelier to be infected by HIV than uncircumcised counterparts.
The results of these studies are likely to be unveiled in 2008. If the findings concur, the way is open for a campaign to encourage circumcision.
But encouraging the snip will also inevitably run into cultural, psychological and practical hurdles, not least the risk that circumcised men, wrongly believing to be fully protected, engage in unsafe sex.
-- HIV-INFECTED BABIES: Transmission of the AIDS virus to babies, either in the womb or in childbirth, has until now been badly overlooked.
Yet new research shows that the risk of infection can be slashed from as high as 45 percent to below six percent, provided doctors have access to the right drugs and know how to use them, and infected mothers are able to bottle-feed their babies.
Meanwhile, in a pandemic as complex and changing as it is wide, the treatment question will not go away.
And the clamour for funds has been only temporarily muted, thanks to the influx of donations since 2003, when President George W. Bush launched his emergency fund to help AIDS-stricken countries in Africa and the Caribbean.
New figures released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) show 1.65 million poor people have access to antiretrovirals, which turn HIV, a virus that wrecks the immune system and exposes the body to opportunistic disease, from a death sentence into a manageable disease.
By any yardstick, this is a huge gain, for it represents a fourfold increase when compared with the end of 2003.
Also encouraging is the research put forward in Toronto which confirmed that the powerful drugs can be administered very successfully in resource-poor countries and with no evidence so of resistance through misuse.
Common sense diagnostics can replace lab tests as a yardstick of infection and semi-skilled workers can substitute for doctors to ensure patients comply with the drug regimen.
Even so, the drug distribution still only reaches a quarter of the total of people who need them.
To reach the other 75 percent, to continue treating those already taking the drugs, to prevent new infections and to implement other essential programmes in this war on many fronts will require more money -- lots of it.
"There has been some important progress" on funding, said the WHO's stand-in director-general Anders Nordstrom, noting that global AIDS spending stood at more than eight billion dollars in 2005, a five-fold increase over 2001.
"But that is still not enough. The estimated need in low- and middle-income countries is 15 billion dollars this year, growing to 22 billion in 2008. That widening gap must be filled," said Nordstrom.