World AIDS Day
Today is World AIDS day. I found a reference to Link and Think on Dave Winer’s weblog Scripting.com... My experiences with HIV/AIDS have been mainly through working with organizations like London Lighthouse (since absorbed in to the Terrance Higgins Trust) and the Immune Development Trust on behalf of my employer. Well, before that I had bought Strip AIDS (which funded the founding of Lighthouse), and of course I was at university in the late 1980s when discussion of AIDS, safer sex, and celibacy was at its peak. It was partly because of that that I was so pleased that OCC’s membership of the SEAHORSE project gave me a chance to contribute something to HIV/AIDS support, even if (like most European R&D projects) the main result was an obscure web site. I thought I knew a reasonable amount about HIV, but meeting real people and visiting the Lighthouse makes it real in a way book-learning. I was slightly in awe of the guys who had been living with HIV for a decade or more—they don’t get much mention because everyone’s concentrating on supporting the newly diagnosed and educating the uninfected masses, but they do have their own different needs.