Gus Cairns talks to Julie Davids, one of a new breed of US Aids activists who have galvanised poor Americans into demanding their health rights, squeezed Aids dosh out of George Bush, and may even have broken the patent power of the pharmacos

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We're told that the activists who once 'died' on the streets to get HIV treatment are either now dead in reality, or living post-Aids, net-curtain lives.
Well, maybe...but in one corner of the USA a radical chapter of ACT UP has grown and grown, uniting lesbian leftists with black drug users, staging many a protest, and wielding real influence at the tables of global economic policy.
There's a new kind of person involved in the middle of all this. Invited along to an activists' meeting at the

Seattle Retrovirus Conference, I come across a short, spunky woman in a tracksuit who talks like a jackhammer. Her name is Julie Davids. She's from ACT UP Philadelphia and the international health equality lobby that grew out of it, the Health GAP Coalition.
"The image of Aids protest in the US is ACT UP New York," says Davids. "Professional gay men, outraged their career paths had been derailed by Aids, who

swapped their Wall Street suits for boots and bandannas. We're not like