A Liverpool woman who worked during the AIDS crisis has reflected on the true extent of the virus outbreak.
Kathleen Charters, who lives in the city centre, worked during the 80s and 90s as a massage therapist. She first got involved after volunteering with an organisation called The Lighthouse in London. There, she was desperately trying to understand what she could do to help and assist people living with HIV - especially the LGBTQ+ community.
With this in mind, the 60-year-old tried her hand at massage therapy as people were looking for alternative remedies at the time due to a lack of medication.
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The Wirral's HIV lead for Sahir House told the ECHO: “Touch and therapeutic touch were very important to people. I was the person who touched people and it’s just hard to put that into words as sometimes these hands were the last hands that touched someone because sometimes family hands weren’t. It was the people who were able to overcome any fear that got into people’s lives at their request and consent and supported them in whatever way that was. It was like a family with a close community.”
Although HIV still holds a stigma to this day, it has somewhat progressed. However, at the height of the crisis, it was referred to as “the gay plague” and often looked at as a death sentence, so people like Kathleen were few and far between.
Kathleen said: “Sometimes it's hard to remember but, in Liverpool, we were attending like two or three funerals a month certainly. These were very young men at the time but not all men as HIV doesn’t discriminate against anyone. I was certainly tender because of being constantly surrounded by almost a world of pessimism. Because you knew there was a potential that friends and service users weren’t going to make it through there was a real heightened sense of making it great and as best as possible now for those.”
Thankfully, Kathleen hasn’t heard of anyone who has died from HIV “for a long, long time”. But in spite of this and “as a Liverpool-born woman”, she “despairs the talent and potential” the city lost in those early years.
She added: “I knew journalists, actors, doctors and it was all lost. It’s terribly sad and I know in my heart that those people would rejoice in the steps and advances in medication that have been made so people now can do what they were put on this earth to do. From looking at tablets every day and feeling overwhelmed, I now feel more grateful, positive and much more thankful people have worked so hard to make those advances in medication.”
Now no longer a death sentence, HIV still carries "gay" connotations, despite the fact straight people now make up more new HIV diagnoses than gay people in England. Although there is still no cure for HIV, today - with early diagnosis and treatment - people living with HIV can expect to live a normal life span.
Liverpool is a "fast-track city" committed to ending all new transmissions of HIV by 2030. Over 36m people worldwide have died of HIV/AIDS-related illnesses, whereas an estimated 37m people are currently living with HIV, making it one of the most important global public health issues in recorded history. Around 106,890 people in the UK are currently living with HIV - 9,750 of whom live in the North West.
People living with HIV, who are on effective antiretroviral therapy (ART), cannot pass the virus on as undetectable equals untransmittable (U=U). Of those living with HIV in the North West, 99% are on ART. Kathleen herself is untransmittable.
The 60-year-old doesn’t know exactly when she contracted the virus but reckons she has been living with HIV for around 20 years now. At the time, AZT - the first drug to treat HIV - had come out, but as other effective methods hadn’t, Kathleen felt like it was “still a terminal diagnosis”.
She said: “I was a professional working in the HIV field, so there was that element of I knew how things would look and how things could go. I had direct experience with people having difficulty in ongoing situations, opportunistic infections, and death. So I knew I could probably have all of these things and I was devastated. I was fighting for my life when I was diagnosed and that was very real for me and everyone else.”
However, now, in line with HIV Testing Week, Kathleen wants to show others “there's nothing to be scared of anymore, there's nothing to be afraid of and there's nothing to be ashamed of for sure". Alongside Sahir House, Kathleen is calling on the public to know their status as the virus can affect anyone.
It used to take weeks to get the result of an HIV test, but now it can be done in the comfort of your own home by taking a self-test with just minutes to wait before finding out your status, or a postal test which is sent to a lab and screened for both HIV and syphilis at the same time.
The free test kits are small enough to fit through a letterbox and arrive in plain packaging with information and signposting to support alongside the test. If a positive or "reactive" result is given then a confirmatory test in a sexual health clinic is necessary to make sure the result is correct.
Kathleen said: “Knowledge is power and the only way you know if you have HIV is by testing for it. It's just how it is.”
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