It’s Positive Nation’s 100th issue this month. Since
1995, PN has chronicled the landmark events in HIV in the UK and worldwide.
PN’s former News Editor Roger Goode surveys just some of them
News is the easy bit in Positive Nation: there’s a lot of it about. No doubt, from time to time, ‘events’ rock the world of Crochet Monthly, but developments in HIV can be chronicled in life-and-death terms without embarrassment.
Take the very first news story covered by PN in issue one of October 1995. “A Roman Catholic priest from Dungavan, Ireland”...(you are bracing yourself already, aren’t you?)...”started an Aids scare by warning that a dying woman confessed to him she had infected up to 80 men in revenge against the boyfriend who infected her...” According to the priest, the 25-year-old was unable to confirm this story because she was now “too ill to speak”.
Also in issue one was a story about a Gateshead man banned from the birth of his second son by his wife, who was “convinced that he had Aids” after he had eaten a tin of tuna from Tesco that contained a condom.
By issue three, December 1995, PN was already stuck into its first campaign: to force the government to fund combination treatment for all who could benefit from it after the Delta Trial. A PN study identified 3,500 people living in the UK with HIV who could benefit from combination therapy, which would cost an additional £12 million a year. “Our lives are too important to be left to chance in the lottery of NHS funding,” said the magazine.
But Delta was only about dual-nucleoside therapy. A year later, by issue 13 in December 1996, the whole landscape had changed. PN was declaring: “Combination therapies using protease inhibitors are emptying Aids wards around the developed world.” Dr Ian Weller at London’s Middlesex Hospital told the magazine: “We are talking about a 40 to 50 per cent reduction in mortality. There is a tremendous air of optimism and rightly so.”
But three issues later PN was seeking “a cure for over optimism,” listing treatment centres around the country that were turning away people seeking the combination therapy that was the cause of that optimism. More than 80 people in Bristol, for example, were being denied treatment. They were given letters telling them to go to London, 120 miles away, and to try there. Patients in Exeter and Devon faced a choice of a 200-mile trip to London for AZT alone.
Issue 16, in April 1997, found that more than 80 per cent of Tory candidates, questioned prior to that year’s general election, rejected all or part of a George House Trust list of measures to fight HIV, including increased healthcare funding and support for HIV work in developing countries.
In the very month of the election, May, Southmead Hospital in Bristol announced that three patients who had initially been given combination therapy had had the treatment withdrawn through lack of cash. One had died, a second had become so ill she was put back onto treatment and the third was travelling backwards and forwards to London.
The Royal Infirmary, Cardiff, had a different problem. It told PN: “Please send no more copies as we will only be shredding and binning them.” Its Dr Richard Sparks had taken exception to a “pornographic” advertisement in the magazine by fashion company Diesel. Dr Sparks relented after protests but set up “a team of health advisers” to vet PN in future before making it available to patients.
The October issue of that year featured an archive photo of a princess shaking the hand of a Person with Aids. “Diana, Princes of Wales, shook the hand of a PWA at the Middlesex Hospital in 1988. Both are now dead,” the caption said.
The magazine had cheered up by February 1998 as it delighted in rubbishing one of Diana’s favourite hangouts, the London Lighthouse. It was all down to money; counselling at the Lighthouse cost £93 an hour, PN revealed. Even putting a child in the crèche cost £35 an hour. Rival organizations insisted they could provide childcare in the home for less than £20 an hour. An NHS insider declared: “It is over-staffed and, frankly, over-furbished and, despite its great past, is no longer value for money.”
A ‘Bloodless Coo’ was celebrated in issue 29 with the birth of pioneering baby Sarah, born to the UKC’s Ruth and Colin Webb. A bloodless Caesarean technique developed by the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital brought mum-to-baby transmission of HIV close to ‘elimination’ in Britain.
Nonoxynol-9, a spermicide used in condoms, might guard against conception, said PN in October 1998, but also helped spread HIV among gay men, thanks to its habit of causing tiny rectal lesions. The magazine turned its guns on Durex, which continued to produce a range of condoms often used by gay men and with the dangerous spermicide. Durex finally removed N-9 from all their condoms in January this year.
More loved was Andrew Sullivan, the British-born Washington-based commentator and chronicler of ‘the end of Aids’ who was, according to PN 39, almost too clever by half. Perhaps not quite so clever was International Development Minister Clare Short, who remarked in the same issue that buying HIV drugs for the developing world was “silly...it merely wastes time and money.”
Winnie Ssanyu-Sseruma made her mark by becoming the first positive black woman to appear on a PN cover in March 1999 (PN 40) when she called on positive Africans to come out of the closet. Two months later, Mariam Kajungu stepped forward, our first black woman African asylum seeker.
The Millennium was marked with PN’s 50th issue and the merger of the THT, the Aled Richards Trust and the Lighthouse. They called it ‘developing partnerships’ but the magazine was there to call it what it was: the start of ‘HIV service lite’ as a generation of cosy drop-in centres morphed into something else.
More significant still was the closure of London’s Body Positive on 31 May that year. “The days of well-intentioned positive people running the show are over,” said THT Deputy Chief Executive Paul Ward (himself HIV positive) in issue 56.
The following issue witnessed at first hand ‘the horror and the hope
of Africa’ as PN charted the sudden explosion of poor-world Aids treatment
activism that was the Durban Aids Conference. It also told new London Mayor,
Ken Livingstone, to knock the heads of London’s 16 health authorities
and 33 boroughs (“that’s 49 meddlers”) together.
The October issue of 2000 (issue 59) put Andy
Hewlett, a white, middle-class male on the
cover. He was
also the UK’s first openly HIV positive copper.
Issue 60 went for its first openly positive teenager, Kate Mclean, the oldest
person living in Scotland to be born with HIV, and her adoptive mother Colleen.
Glaswegian Stephen Kelly was also described in superlatives: “Scotland’s most evil man” for starters, though by the tabloids, not PN, which featured the UK’s first conviction for passing on HIV in April 2001 (issue 65). The 33-year-old found himself charged with culpable and reckless conduct for having unprotected sex knowing he had HIV.
By contrast, Sir Elton John was dubbed a hero by PN in February 2002 when he received the UKC’s first Hero Award for services to people with HIV at an inevitably ‘glittering’ ceremony at The Dorchester.
It was from super star to supervirus by April 2002 when the magazine described the first unequivocal case of HIV superinfection - where a person is infected a second time by a more virulent strain of the virus.
In 2003, PN produced what at times felt like the only sane headlines in the British press containing the words “asylum” and “Aids”. It also considered the “shambles” of Britain’s sexual health services and the soaring increase in STDs, especially among young people, and the “total mess” of HIV funding in the NHS. Globally, it challenged the British government’s failure to support The Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and malaria in Africa, shaming it into action.
With the last issue of PN (99) we came
full circle, back to the issues of
that first-ever
news story.
Mohammed Dica had
been
convicted of
inflicting GBH with
his virus. “We can’t keep on defending non-disclosure,” said
PN. In a world where positive people survive to grapple with issues like stigma
and criminalisation, Positive Nation will still have plenty to campaign about.
Watch out for the next 100 issues.
