A Ugandan-born woman diagnosed with HIV in 1988 who went back to Africa to die, arrived in the UK with a CD4 count of one, and built a career spanning 20 countries in African health policy.

Summary

Winnie Sseruma left Uganda on a scholarship to study sociology in Kansas in 1981. The students there asked her if she lived in a tree. By 1988, she was 27, back in the United States, and applying for an internship that required an HIV test. It came back positive. She told her partner, who blamed her, ghosted her, then called back weeks later to say his own test was negative. After that, Winnie stopped telling anyone. She sat through conversations where friends described how they'd treat an HIV-positive person - never eat in their house, never share a bathroom, never be friends - and said nothing.

She was offered AZT, which she couldn't afford. The side effects turned her skin from shiny black to ashy. Between 1990 and 1993, her brother, her mother, and her father all died while she was trapped in the US. In 1994, she packed six months' worth of medication and flew to Uganda to die. When the pills ran out, she got TB, pneumonia, and diarrhoea. She nearly died, but a short trip to the UK saved her. At Newham General Hospital, her CD4 count was one.

A Ugandan woman she'd met only briefly invited her to a place to socialise. It was a support group for people living with HIV. Winnie could see herself in the women there. She went from preparing to die to learning how treatment works - and it was, in her word, invigorating. She co-founded the African HIV Policy Network, chaired it from Parliament, co-wrote Our Stories Told by Us, and now monitors health programmes across 20 African countries for the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

Key Moments

• [02:05] Kansas, 1981 - a scholarship, a culture shock, and students who thought Ugandans lived in trees
• [07:05] The positive result - an internship test in 1988, a death sentence at 27, and a life flashing before her eyes
• [08:58] Telling a partner - blame, rejection, being ghosted, and the lesson that disclosure was not safe
• [11:49] Conversations she sat through - friends describing how they'd never eat in the house of someone with HIV, while Winnie stayed silent beside them
• [12:37] AZT and its costs - paying for medication with no insurance, vomiting the pills back up, and a treatment that changed her skin colour
• [17:02] Four deaths in four years - a brother in 1991, a mother in 1990, a father in 1993, all from Uganda while Winnie couldn't leave the US
• [17:52] Going back to Uganda to die - six months of medication, then TB, pneumonia, and a CD4 count of one at Newham General Hospital
• [21:33] The Ugandan woman and the support group - an invitation framed as socialising, a room full of women telling their stories, and the moment Winnie stopped being alone
• [26:07] The African HIV Policy Network and Fed Up - supporting African women with HIV to engage with policy, and fighting a UK Department of Health that treated an entire continent as one community
• [39:54] Our Stories Told by Us - a book co-written with four friends to change the narrative about African communities and the UK HIV response
• [42:41] Remembering her brother - a gentle giant who died of HIV-related TB in 1991 at 27, the same age Winnie was when she was diagnosed

Dedication

Winnie remembers her brother, who died of HIV-related TB in 1991 at the age of 27 - the same age she was at diagnosis. She wants him to know he was loved.

About Winnie Sseruma

Winnie Sseruma was born in Sheffield and raised in Uganda. She was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 in the United States. She co-founded the African HIV Policy Network, chaired it from Parliament, and co-wrote Our Stories Told by Us: Celebrating the African Contribution to the UK HIV Response. She works across 20 African countries monitoring health programmes for the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

Resources

• Buy Our Stories Told By Us, the book
• Stephen Lewis Foundation
• National AIDS Trust
• Terrence Higgins Trust
• Positively UK
• The 2025–2030 UK HIV Action Plan

If you have been affected by the themes in this episode, support is available at tht.org.uk.

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

Available now on Spotify and Apple Music.

Apple Music / Spotify

Profits from sales will go towards plugging the remaining £1k costs incurred in producing the #AIDS2026 specials, 'Rio Calling'.

'Rio Calling' crowd-funder: https://hiv-the-morning-after.captivate.fm/rethinkrebuildrise

LYRICS:[Verse 1]

They came to Rio, sun and rain,

the world arrived to talk again,

with rights and science, hand in hand,

and here Brazil, she took a stand.

[Pre-Chorus]

The funding's running dry,

and pharma's flying high,

they warned us: cuts bring death

we answer with one breath:

[Chorus]

So rethink, rebuild and rise,

raise the science to the skies,

no access, that's no justice

so open up your eyes.

[Verse 2]

They spoke of jabs beyond the pill,

long-acting shots to fit the bill,

so bNAbs — is it hope or hype?

The cure's still climbing up the pipe.

[Pre-Chorus]

The funding's running dry,

and pharma's flying high,

they warned us: cuts bring death

we answer with one breath:

[Chorus]

So rethink, rebuild and rise,

raise the science to the skies,

no access, that's no justice

so open up your eyes.

[Toast / Bridge]

Now — U equals U, so hear me shout:

undetectable, don't stress out!

PrEP inna motion, long-acting too,

communities leading - that's nothing new!

Criminalised, but still we rise,

harm reduction, open your eyes!

From testing to treatment we hold the line

rethink, rebuild, one more time!

[Verse 3]

We're ageing now, we're living long,

they wrote a session, wrote this song,

"live long, live strong," the doctors said,

now mind your liver, heart and head.

[Chorus]

So rethink, rebuild and rise,

raise the science to the skies,

no access, that's no justice

so open up your eyes.

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Kene Esom (HIV policy & human rights), Dr Laura Waters (HIV/sexual health medicine), Simon Collins (HIV treatment advocacy), Eliane Becks Nininahazwe (HIV activism & arts), Pank Sethi (HIV advocacy & photography), Sita Shahi (HIV advocacy — women), Brenda Crabtree-Ramírez (HIV research & medicine), Maxx Boykin (HIV policy & organising), Olimbi Hoxhaj (HIV advocacy), Knowledge Mupembe (harm reduction & HIV), Antonio Flores (HIV/TB medicine — MSF), Davide Scalenghe (global health communications), Christabel Millar (HIV community advocacy), Damien Fagan (pharmaceuticals — Gilead), Michael (gay & bisexual network — Tanzania), Andrea Carolina (HIV & pharmacy access — Colombia), Derrick Mapp (HIV), Derrick Powell (HIV retention navigation), Joan Steven (HIV community facilitation), Sarah (HIV advocacy — women), Jonathan Blake, Eli Fitzgerald, Garry Brough, Peter Willis.

CROWDFUNDER LINK

The series closes on the cost that rarely finds its way into official reports. Dan Hall and dan glass end their week in Rio asking what's been lost as HIV's physical spaces have gone digital or disappeared, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA closing the series with a clinical perspective on what peer support still can't be replaced by.

Archive testimony comes from Jonathan Blake, diagnosed in October 1982 among the first in Britain, on standing in the darkest corner of the room; Eli Fitzgerald, a trans man born with HIV who works in peer support for young people, on chosen family and being loved because of his status, not in spite of it; Garry Brough, diagnosed in 1991 and now a builder of peer support programmes across the sector, on twenty years of sitting opposite the newly diagnosed; and Peter Willis, a retired GP and at eighty-three the oldest voice in the archive, on stigma and isolation among older people living with HIV.

Links

• BHIVA
• HIV i-Base
• AIDS 2026, the 26th International AIDS Conference
• Positively UK, peer-led support, advocacy and information
• Terrence Higgins Trust

Extra Special Thanks Anonymous, Careen Hertzog, Peter Staley, Philippe Cahill, Simon Collins, Soleta Rogan, Tom McKitterick

Thanks Adam Price, Alix Fox, Apostolos James Vogiatzis, Bryn Gay, Emma20Cole, Garry Brough, Moray Laing, Ross Fletcher, Sarah Schulman, Siobhán Allison

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

CROWDFUNDER LINK

Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Sophia Strachan (Sophia Forum), Garry Brough (European AIDS Treatment Group), Dr. Brenda Crabtree-Ramírez (Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición Salvador Zubirán), Sita Shahi (International Community of Women Living with HIV Asia Pacific), Dr. Laura Waters (The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust), Kene Esom (United Nations Development Programme), Dr. Chinedu Emmanuel (mothers2mothers), Julie Foreman (BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS), Deborah Carpenter (FHI 360), Andrea Domânico (CRT DST/Aids-SP). Plus archive intervews with: Caroline Guinness, Susan Cole-Haley, Ellie Harrison, Angelina Namiba.

The drug trials were run on men. The women were left to work out the rest for themselves. Dan Hall and dan glass mark AIDS 2026's focus on neglected groups, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA opening and closing on the clinical case for research that finally caught up.

Archive testimony comes from Caroline Guinness, co-founder of Positively Women and diagnosed in 1986, on trials that were never designed with women in mind; Susan Cole-Haley on the stranger who wrote to her after seeing her pregnant and positive on a magazine cover; Ellie Harrison, diagnosed at twenty-one, on searching for a woman like her and finding no one; and Angelina Namiba, diagnosed in London in 1993 and given six months to live, on the friend, the peer support, and the job that got her through.

Links

• BHIVA
• HIV i-Base
• AIDS 2026, the 26th International AIDS Conference
• Sophia Forum, women and HIV
• Sophia Forum, HIV and Women: Invisible No Longer

Thanks Adam Price, Alix Fox, Anonymous, Apostolos James Vogiatzis, Bryn Gay, Careen Hertzog, Emma20Cole, Garry Brough, Moray Laing, Peter Staley, Philippe Cahill, Ross Fletcher, Sarah Schulman, Simon Collins, Siobhán Allison, Soleta Rogan, Tom McKitterick

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

CROWDFUNDER LINK

Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Antonio Flores, Damien Fagan (Gilead), ICWAP, Thorne Harbour Health, Derrick Mapp, Laura Walters (Gilead / NHS Royal Free Hospital), Luca Stevenson, Joan Stephen, Axel Bautista (Mpact Global Action), Derrick Powell, Brenda Crabtree, Maxx Boykin, Eliane Becks Nininahazwe, Fatima Hassan. Plus archive from Anthony Bird, Jim Vogiatzis, Mark S King and Chris Smith.

The drugs worked, but conversations are rarely happened about what comes next. Dan Hall and dan glass spend Day Four of AIDS 2026 exploring the gap between the headline and the aftermath, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA bookending the episode on managing a condition nobody's lived with this long before.

Archive testimony comes from Anthony Bird, diagnosed in 1995 after an illness that nearly killed him, on an ordinary life once the side effects settled down; Jim Vogiatzis on the peripheral neuropathy that combination therapy left behind; Mark S King, an American writer and activist diagnosed in 1985, on the strange guilt of surviving after a decade spent preparing to die; and Chris Smith, Britain's first openly gay MP and the first parliamentarian to disclose his HIV status, on facing an uncertain future nearly forty years in.

Links

• BHIVA
• HIV i-Base
• AIDS 2026, the 26th International AIDS Conference
• Positively UK, National Long Term Survivors Group
• George House Trust, HIV support and peer mentoring

Thanks Adam Price, Alix Fox, Anonymous, Apostolos James Vogiatzis, Bryn Gay, Careen Hertzog, Emma20Cole, Garry Brough, Moray Laing, Peter Staley, Philippe Cahill, Ross Fletcher, Sarah Schulman, Simon Collins, Siobhán Allison, Soleta Rogan, Tom McKitterick

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

CROWDFUNDER LINK

Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Andrea Carolina, Fatima Hassan, Derrick Powell, Sophie Strachan, Simon Collins, Eliane Becks Nininahazwe, Davide Scalenghe, Kene Esom, Pankaj Sethi, Winnie Sseruma, Louise Vallace, Reverend Jide Macaulay, "Jan".

HIV has always found the margins first. Live from Rio, Dan Hall and dan glass connect UK testimony to the wider global picture, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA opening and closing with the clinical picture.

Archive testimony comes from Winnie Sseruma (episode drops 7 August), raised in Uganda and diagnosed in the United States in 1988; Louise Vallace (episode drops 28 August), a yoga therapist of Windrush Caribbean heritage, on shame in a small community where everyone knows everyone; Reverend Jide Macaulay (episode drops 21 August), a British Nigerian priest and founder of House of Rainbow, on his own father's support for a law that would criminalise him; and an anonymised contributor known only as "Jan", diagnosed while living in Turkey, on the state and the stateless.

Links

• BHIVA
• HIV i-Base
• AIDS 2026, the 26th International AIDS Conference
• National AIDS Trust, Three ways the UK asylum system fails people living with HIV
• National AIDS Trust, HIV in the UK: video guides for migrants

Thanks Adam Price, Alix Fox, Anonymous, Apostolos James Vogiatzis, Bryn Gay, Careen Hertzog, Emma20Cole, Garry Brough, Moray Laing, Peter Staley, Philippe Cahill, Ross Fletcher, Sarah Schulman, Simon Collins, Siobhán Allison, Soleta Rogan, Tom McKitterick

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

CROWDFUNDER LINK

Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Carluz, Davide Scalenghe, Eliane Becks Nininahazwe, Joan Stephen, Kene Esom, Pankaj Sethi, Vincent LeClerc, Martin Fenerty, Marc Thompson, Nathaniel Hall, Alexander Cheves

Not the tombstone-era kind. This one lives in your dating apps and your GP's waiting room. Dan Hall and dan glass spend Day Two of AIDS 2026 asking delegates where stigma still bites, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA framing the episode with the clinical view from the consulting room.

Archive testimony comes from Martin Fenerty, a counsellor and psychotherapist from Liverpool diagnosed in 1993, on having his confidentiality broken early in his diagnosis; Marc Thompson on U=U and the men who didn't believe him anyway; Nathaniel Hall (episode drops 11 September 2026), actor and theatre maker diagnosed at seventeen, on the fifteen years he kept his status secret and the case for saying it louder; and writer Alexander Cheves on naming shame as the real enemy.

Links

• BHIVA
• HIV i-Base
• AIDS 2026, the 26th International AIDS Conference
• Terrence Higgins Trust, Stigma
• Prevention Access Campaign, Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U)

Thanks Adam Price, Alix Fox, Anonymous, Apostolos James Vogiatzis, Bryn Gay, Careen Hertzog, Emma20Cole, Garry Brough, Moray Laing, Peter Staley, Philippe Cahill, Ross Fletcher, Sarah Schulman, Simon Collins, Siobhán Allison, Soleta Rogan, Tom McKitterick

#AIDS2026 #RethinkRebuildRise

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

CROWDFUNDER LINK

Featuring: Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Matthew Hodson, Gus Cairns, Diego Agurto Beroiza, Silvia Petretti. Plus on-site interviews with Simon Collins, Kene Esom, Joan Stephen, Derrick Powell, Vincent LeClerc, Eliane Becks Nininahazwe, Luca Stevenson and Sophie Strachan.

The cuts are real, and they're killing people. On the opening day of AIDS 2026, Dan Hall and dan glass ask conference delegates what happens when the money that built forty years of progress simply stops arriving.

Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA tops and tails the episode with the clinical reality of clinics shutting their doors.

Archive testimony comes from Matthew Hodson, writer, activist and former executive director of NAM aidsmap, on why the death toll is rising again; Gus Cairns, HIV journalist and educator diagnosed in 1985, on the collapse of US assistance to Africa; Diego Agurto Beroiza, Chilean theatre maker and activist, on PrEP funding disappearing in Argentina; and Silvia Petretti, chief executive of Positively UK, on grief for those already lost and anger at those still to come.

Links

• BHIVA
• HIV i-Base
• AIDS 2026, the 26th International AIDS Conference
• UNAIDS, Overcoming Disruption, Transforming the AIDS Response (2025 World AIDS Day report)
• UNAIDS, 2025 Global AIDS Update, AIDS, Crisis and the Power to Transform

Extra Special Thanks Anonymous, Soleta Rogan

Thanks Adam Price, Alix Fox, Apostolos James Vogiatzis, Bryn Gay, Careen Hertzog, Emma20Cole, Garry Brough, Moray Laing, Peter Staley, Philippe Cahill, Ross Fletcher, Sarah Schulman, Simon Collins, Siobhán Allison, Tom McKitterick

#AIDS2026 #RethinkRebuildRise

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

Rio Calling is a six-part daily spin-off of HIV: The Morning After, broadcast from inside AIDS 2026 - the biggest HIV conference on the planet. Every day for six days, we're bringing you what's actually being said on the conference floor, what it means for people living with HIV, and how it lands against decades of lived experience from the podcast archive.

Please help to cover our costs! RIO CALLING Fundraising Link

Hosting duties fall to two Dans: Dan Hall, producer and presenter of HIV: The Morning After, and Dan Glass, ACT UP activist, author, and a man with infinite energy to make the world better. Together they unpack each day's theme, with clinical steer from Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA. Wrapped around the raw interviews from the conference itself are clips from podcast guests including Jonathan Blake, Marc Thompson, Silvia Petretti, Ellie Harrison, Susan Cole-Haley, Angelina Namiba, Ellie Harrison and Alexander Cheves.

Please help to cover our costs! RIO CALLING Fundraising Link

Six days. Six themes. One conference deciding what happens next.

• Episode 1 - Money Talks: Funding cuts, PEPFAR, and what happens when the world stops paying attention.
• Episode 2 - Still Ashamed: Stigma hasn't gone anywhere — it's just moved to your dating apps and your GP's waiting room.
• Episode 3 - Whose Epidemic?: Migration, gender, and the voices the mainstream narrative keeps leaving out.
• Episode 4 - Undetectable, Not Untouched: The science has moved on. Has life?
• Episode 5 - Left Out of the Trial: Women, research gaps, and reproductive healthcare that's still catching up.
• Episode 6 - The Empty Room: What we lost when the community spaces closed - and what it costs to be surviving alone.

Subscribe in this feed now - new episodes land daily throughout AIDS 2026.

Please help to cover our costs! RIO CALLING Fundraising Link

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

Crowdfunder Link: RIO CALLING Fundraising Link

A Ukrainian DJ who started injecting heroin at 16 to help him sleep, survived six overdoses on the streets of Kyiv, and became one of Europe's most forceful voices for harm reduction and HIV treatment access - now fighting to keep supply chains open during a war.

Summary

Anton was born in Kyiv in 1986, just before the Soviet Union collapsed. His parents were public servants on small salaries, and while they worked to feed the family, the streets outside were filling with new substances flowing through newly opened borders. He started using drugs at 14. At 16, someone told him heroin would help him sleep between DJ sets. It did, briefly, and then it took over everything. For 11 years, Anton lived rough in Kyiv - sleeping in stairwells, dodging police who saw drug users as easy shakedown money, and surviving six overdoses.

The door opened through a harm reduction programme. Someone offered him a clean needle, asked if he wanted a sandwich, and didn't start with the word "drugs." That encounter led to an HIV and hepatitis C diagnosis - and to the realisation that he wanted to transform his experience into work.

Today, Anton is a founding member of the Ukrainian Network of People Who Use Drugs and one of the most prominent HIV and drug policy advocates in Eastern Europe. Since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, he and his peers have been using personal vehicles to transport HIV medications to regions where logistics companies refuse to go, and building online platforms so people can receive treatment by courier rather than attending destroyed clinics.

Key Moments

• [01:18] Born in Kyiv, 1986 - growing up in the post-Soviet wild west, where the Iron Curtain opened to new freedoms and new substances simultaneously
• [05:57] Heroin as a sleeping pill - starting at 16 to manage exhaustion from DJing, and the moment the body realised it liked the euphoria too
• [07:04] Harm reduction vs. abstinence - why the 12-step model didn't fit, and the science that says success doesn't always mean stopping
• [08:03] The first harm reduction visit - being asked how he felt and whether he wanted a coffee, not lectured about his drug use
• [10:17] Eleven years as an ordinary street junkie - Groundhog Day on the streets of Kyiv, locked out of his parents' home, jumping at every sound in stairwells
• [12:02] Police and corruption - drug users as the easiest source of money for officers and doctors, and the threat of withdrawal behind bars
• [14:11] The dual diagnosis - HIV and hepatitis C, a positive test received as a death sentence, and the perverse logic of using more because you're dying anyway
• [16:43] War and supply chains - how the 2014 Crimea annexation and then Covid prepared Ukraine's HIV community for the 2022 full-scale invasion
• [19:36] Medication by courier - dismantling the old model of clinic-based collection, and community members driving HIV treatment through war zones in their own cars
• [22:23] If Ukraine falls - what Russian occupation would mean for harm reduction, opioid therapy, and the LGBTQ community, and why Anton believes it won't happen

Dedication

Anton remembers Egor, a childhood friend from the pioneer camps whose parents worked alongside his at the Ministry of Interior - one of the first people he lost to the heroin epidemic. He also remembers a brother and sister from his neighbourhood who both died of HIV-associated tuberculosis, leaving children behind.

About Anton

Anton was born in Kyiv in 1986. He is a founding member of the Ukrainian Network of People Who Use Drugs and a leading HIV and drug policy advocate in Eastern Europe. He is a DJ and a father, and takes one pill every morning at nine o'clock. He is the podcast's first Ukrainian guest.

Resources

• Ukrainian Network of People Who Use Drugs
• Eurasian Harm Reduction Association
• Terrence Higgins Trust
• National AIDS Trust

If you have been affected by the themes in this episode, support is available at tht.org.uk.

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp