The New Plague

At the start of the 1980s a mysterious disease, AIDS, appeared in gay men. There was fear that it would become a new plague. Sally Sheard tells the story of how activists, doctors and politicians worked together to stop the disease spreading.

Apart from a handful of individual doctors who saw gay men with Kaposi's sarcoma and a pneumocystis pneumonia,, there was no reaction from the government in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. The gay community took matters into their own hands and in 1982 the Terrence Higgins Trust was set up, named after one of the first men to die from AIDS, to give advice. By the mid 1980s Donald Acheson, the Chief Medical Officer, realised he had to find a policy to tackle the new disease that would be accepted by the medical profession, the gay community and government. One of Donald Acheson's great achievements was persuading Health Minister Norman Fowler that AIDS needed serious attention. This approach culminated in the famous tombstones advert voiced by John Hurt that proclaimed "don't die of ignorance".