How do we keep this year's momentum for global Aids treatment going? Gus Cairns talks to Shaun Mellors, community chair of the last
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At the Barcelona World Aids Conference in July, world
leaders finally agreed that HIV treatment with prevention was an urgent
global necessity and started talking serious money. The Johannesburg Earth
Summit continued the theme: a viral infection spread through sex and needles
is, it is finally acknowledged, as devastating to the world's health as
lack of food and clean water.
But how do we achieve the stated aim of three million on combination therapy
by the next World Conference at Bangkok in 2004? How do we start to bring
the HIV figures down? And how can HIV positive people remain a powerful
voice at the centre of this huge global effort?
Who better to ask than Shaun Mellors? Shaun has been the
community chair of the last two World Aids Conferences
and involved in many more. Diagnosed in 1986 at the age of 20, he was
the first South African to come out as publicly HIV positive two years
later.
Involved in Global Aids Organisations since 1990, former linchpin of the
Global Network of people Living with HIV and Aids (GNP+), and Community
Chair at both Durban and Barcelona, a man of immense strength and charm,
Shaun has spent his adult life driving the Aids agenda forward. He now
advocates and lobbies for community involvement in South African trials
of HIV vaccines and microbicides. Not someone inclined to let a little
bit of Aids get him down, he dismissively refers to
his own reaction to diagnosis as "All the usual feeling
sorry for yourself..."
Yet Shaun seemed shaky and fragile at the community opening
ceremony, his slight
