ENDING the whispering

not surprisingly when you remember the UN’s biggest contributor, the USA, is also its biggest defaulter). But what it does have is influence with governments and policy-making

bodies.
UNAIDS launched ‘Live and Let Live’ as an awareness-raising campaign during 2002, in preparation for a major drive to change the attitudes of important institutions during 2003-4.
Andrew Doupe is the campaign’s coordinator. He says:
“The World Aids Day campaign has traditionally been UNAIDS’ only global, across-the board public face. We don’t have the resources or the staff in each

country to mount local campaigns. So Live and Let Live is intended more as a sort of ‘suggestion book’. It illustrates various forms of HIV stigma - in employment, between children, within families, between different communities, among youth - and we encourage individual countries to pick one single theme and then develop their own WAD campaign based around that theme.
“In the UK, for instance, we talked to the National Aids Trust about what was needed in the UK (see page 22). Yours is a country where HIV has come to be seen as an exclusively medical problem, so they came up with a campaign that almost for the first time named a social problem; HIV Prejudice.”

“There is no shame in disclosing a terminal disease from which you are suffering, and HIV is no different. I went public about having both TB in prison and prostate cancer outside, and nobody shunned me. We call on everyone not to treat people who are HIV positive with stigma.” - Nelson Mandela

All case histories and posters courtesy of UNAIDS.