Breaking the stigma around HIV and Aids is part of the purpose of the exhibition Through Positive Eyes, which coincides with World Aids Day that is commemorated annually on December 1.
Open for free today at the Iziko Museum South Africa Slave Lodge in the Company’s Garden, the exhibition has been running since 2007, with 122 HIV-positive people in nine major cities having taken part.
Contributing to an archive of more than 120 000 photographs, thousands of hours of video footage, hundreds of photo-essays and a wide array of mini-documentaries, the exhibition runs until February.
HIV/Aids activist Niles Hemming said that of the 75 million people in the world diagnosed,
35 million had already died and another 35 million still alive could only overcome the illness by not being stigmatised.
“We now have new facts that if you stay consistent with medication, your CD4 count can become undetectable and you will be unable to spread the disease. If a (HIV-) negative person takes ‘PrEP’ (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis), they are unable to contract the virus, and if we mix these things together we can easily create an HIV-free generation, without a vaccine,” he said.
Demonstrating an improvement in the management of the disease is the decline in the infection rate - from 1.9% in 2002 to 0.9% this year, owing to improved education and access to