Kampala Key, Vulnerable and Priority Populations (KVP) News

  Let Us Talk About AIDS     Alex Berg a freelance on-air host and journalist based in New York City, gives us a glimpse of what it means to know that HIV/AIDS has been devastating our lives for 40 years.     “Sawyer, now 67, recalled being told by a doctor, at just 32, to put his affairs in order.   “In addition to being elated that I have survived for 40 years with this illness, I also have a certain degree of survivor's guilt,” Sawyer, a founding member of AIDS activist group ACT UP New York, told NBC News. “Why me? Why did I deserve to survive when so many of my friends and a couple of my boyfriends died really horrible, ugly deaths at very young ages?”   For Eric Sawyer, the 40th anniversary of the first scientific report that described AIDS as a new disease brings up “a dichotomy of feelings.”   When Sawyer, who was living in New York, first began exhibiting symptoms of HIV in 1981, he said he was urged by...

I do not know about you. But, I know about myself. My life took a different turn the day both my parents were diagnosed with HIV. Their lives worsened from the day of that positive diagnosis. They had Slim (locally called Silimu or Obulwadde bwa silimu, Olukonvuba ). Mother, was taken down with an acute fever following the HIV infection. While at the hospital, she developed a rash so invasive that many thought it was chickenpox all over again. She had developed AIDS. Her nails darkened and all blood was drained from the eyes, lips and palms. The next few months, were unbelievable and unlivable. She spent the months going in and out of meningitis-spurred hallucinations, high fevers, spontaneous body jerkings, stiffness and a grotesque grossness wringing the body, squeezing all life out of her already emaciated body. In the dark of the night, when all summoned energies for the vigil were drawn out, she passed away. She never outlived her mother (our grandmother live...