In 1997 James Deutsch became the first openly HIV positive person to head Crusaid. This month he leaves Crusaid to run an animal
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For the last five years, James Deutsch has been a rare
thing in the world of Aids activism. He has been both the dynamic frontman
of the UK's leading HIV and Aids fundraising charity Crusaid, while at
the same time living on the frontline with the virus himself.
Born in the Big Apple in 1963, Deutsch went to school in the city before
studying philosophy at Harvard. After two summers counting rhinos in Kenya
and a year of teaching, he came to Britain to study for a Masters in biological
anthropology at King's College Cambridge and went on to do a doctorate
in zoology.
"As part of my research, I spent two and a half
years in Uganda watching antelopes and became the world's leading expert
on the sex life of a species called the cob!"
He reckons it was while he was in Africa that he caught HIV: "I'd
done some foolish things in Kenya and knew there was a significant chance
that I might have caught HIV. I was diagnosed in 1995 with an African
strain of the virus, when I came down with shingles."
How did he get involved with HIV work?
"In 1996, anti-HIV combination therapy came along after the Vancouver
Conference and I heard about it and learned about it and very quickly
got involved with a fledgling organisation in London called the Aids Treatment
Project (ATP). I soon found working for ATP more rewarding than the work
I was doing at the university."
"At that time most people with HIV were sceptical of the value of
combination therapy and so there
was a major job to be done to educate people, empower them to demand those treatments and pressurise the government to make them widely available. So many
