today the 1st of December is the world AIDS day...

Started on 1st December 1988, World AIDS Day is about raising money, increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education. The World AIDS Day theme for 2010 is 'Universal Access and Human Rights'. World AIDS Day is important for reminding people that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done.

According to UNAIDS estimates, there are now 33.3 million people living with HIV, including 2.5 million children. During 2009 some 2.6 million people became newly infected with the virus and an estimated 1.8 million people died from AIDS.

The vast majority of people with HIV and AIDS live in lower- and middle-income countries. But HIV today is a threat to men, women and children on all continents around the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_AIDS_Day




This is my story of getting in contact with HIV and AIDS, it’s not a big deal, but everything is affecting us in some who I think…

I think that everyone of us has some kind of relationship to HIV or AIDS, my first knowledge about HIV and AIDS was in the middle of the 80´s when a famous artist in Sweden told the rest of the world that he was infected… a shame these days.
The strongest personal memory I have about the HIV and AIDS is when I newly moved in to Gothenburg and I was learning to know new people and I was sitting at a café down town with a new connection and she was telling me that she has a friend that got the diagnose HIV, I know that my first thought was, shit! This is for real…
I also know that I got the feeling of that my life get smaller or that the world get bigger with the words from my new friend, I understand at that point that I have been living a cover life in a small town up in the north of Sweden and now I was in the big city there everything could happen, you can know people with HIV and you don’t know who got it.

Five years ago when I was visiting South Africa and the Cape Town I learn to know people who working for other with HIV and as I understand it also was carrier of the virus. I got this brooch of one of the one I meet as a gift and I wear it and I will always remember the person who get it to me and I will always remember HIV and AIDS, that is a part of our society these days and that the developing countries are the once how is most haunted by it.