UNISON has a good
web page on what the trade unions are doing to mark this day. Check out the links with the TUC and the UNISON guide to “Working with HIV and AIDS”.
In the mid 1980’s I was a welfare rights volunteer at the Edinburgh “Citizen Rights Office” (CRO). Edinburgh at the time was one of the first British cities to have significant number numbers of heterosexual HIV and AIDS sufferers. The majority of them had been exposed to HIV by sharing needles while injecting heroin. This was just a few years after the time and the place where the film “
Trainspotting” was supposed to have been set.
At the time the CRO was very proud to have won the right for people who had HIV to have extra social security benefits in order for them to be able to afford a better diet and kept their weight up. This had been argued successfully at
DHSS appeals to have made it less likely that they would go on to develop AIDS. I don't know if this practice is still accepted?
Times have moved on and now the CRO in Edinburgh is closed and due to medical advances HIV/AIDS, although very serious, is not what we thought at the time to be almost an automatic death sentence.
Still, I often wonder how many of the young people (I was in my early 20's at the time and most of them were much younger than me) I saw while at the CRO are still alive?
Things are not by any means perfect in the UK with regards to medical provision for HIV/AIDS. But it would be good if in another 20 years (or rather sooner!) everyone in the world with HIV/AIDS had access to decent health care and life saving medication.
I suppose this is the real point about today.
