Four decades of HIV/Aids

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh in the UK.We start with the birth of an Australian campaign to get people to take car ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Professor Rachel E. Johnson, Professor of Modern African History at Durham University in the UK.We begin with the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, which bec ...  Show more

In the early days of Aids, a misunderstanding made one man the face of the epidemic. Canadian air steward Gaetan Dugas developed the symptoms of HIV/Aids in the early 1980s, but a misreading of scientific data led to him being identified as 'patient zero', giving the mistaken imp ...  Show more

In 1992 HIV/AIDS hit a grim milestone in the United States when it became the number one cause of death among men ages 25 to 44.Since there was still so much stigma attached to the illness, people were often dying without even telling their closest friends and family that they we ...  Show more

When HIV was first identified in the early 1980s, it was a public health crisis mired in urgent scientific questions: How was it transmitted? What were the symptoms? Could it be treated? But alongside that, and equally challenging to public health, was the stigma attached to t ...

How do we understand something as huge as a global epidemic?

Similarly to Covid, the AIDS epidemic, which was most destructive in the 1980s and 90s, had such universal reach. Yet within that, there were millions of personal experiences.

What was it like to ...