Deborah Waterhouse: ‘The HIV stigma remains, and this is a battle we’ve got to fight’

Deborah Waterhouse: ‘The HIV epidemic probably won’t end until the late 2040s but it’s on the horizon.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

A lot has changed since the devastating 1980s Aids crisis depicted in the Channel 4 TV show It’s a Sin – but the stigma attached to the illness remains, says Deborah Waterhouse. As chief executive of ViiV Healthcare, a GlaxoSmithKline-controlled joint venture that develops HIV drugs, she leads one of the largest commercial developers of Aids treatments in the world.

“I remember in 1987 GSK brought the first medicine out for HIV and at that point the life expectancy for someone living with HIV was 18 months,” she tells the Observer, speaking via video link from her study lined with novels, travel and music books in her home in Richmond, west London.