Treatment Action Campaign

Do you remember where you were 8 years ago? I remember it distinctly. In the summer of 2000, I was in Durban for the first -and so far only - international AIDS conference held on African soil. There are many unkind things said about these events, but those few days in South Africa changed the lives of millions of people forever. I still get shivers when I remember the challenge directed at us by Edwin Cameron, a justice of the South African Supreme Court of Appeal and an openly HIV-positive, gay man. He said: Those of us who live affluent lives, well-attended by medical care and treatment, should not ask how Germans or white South Africans could tolerate living in proximity to moral evil. We do so ourselves today, in proximity to the impending illness and death of many millions of people with AIDS.