Aides (Nonprofit)

The Dior dress worn for the State visit to England (March 2008), and donated for an association auction (13 December 2008). The gala dinner celebrating this anti-AIDS associations 25th anniversary (28 November 2009 under the high patronage of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy). A meeting at Htel Marigny for World AIDS Day (December 2009). At the associations 2010 dinner to send out a message of hope about the prospects of stemming the epidemic.

The Aides association was founded in 1984 by sociologist Daniel Defert after his partner, philosopher Michel Foucault, passed away. This associations distinctive approach involves putting people with AIDS in control of their lives to steer change. It does not consider them mere patients: it treats them as experts in their own health, practices and lives and as regards their communities. Daniel Defert created an open forum that takes in everyone. Seven years later, when his association had achieved public-interest status, started publishing its Remaides magazine and opened its Sida Info Service hotline (with the French national anti-AIDS agency), he retired as President and Arnaud Marty-Lavauzelle replaced him. This psychiatrist, who died in February 2007, often said, There is always something you can do, even in the worst disasters. He also said, I cant imagine anything sadder than someone breezing into a hospital bedroom, dropping off something from the bakery and whizzing off again. Arnaud Marty-Lavauzelle built up Aides from there, organising it around 32 local committees working with 3,500 volunteers in 99 cities. He also took part in efforts to create another association, Ensemble Contre le Sida (Sidaction), and took in ASUD, an association working to curb contamination through drug use. And he was on the team that established the Global Fund to Fight AIDS. Christian Saout took over in 1998 and Bruno Spire has been running this association since 2007. It remains steadfastly independent vis–vis public authorities and loyal to pledge to take innovative initiatives with regard to the law. After inter alia taking part in the first syringe-exchange programmes, it started running a practically instant HIV test in four centres across France, in particular for people who were uncomfortable about going to conventional screening centres. A drop of blood from the fingertip on a blotter is all it takes to find out if the result is positive 30 minutes later. By stepping up funding for healthcare around the world, we could no doubt break this epidemics back. I dont have the exact figures for how much this quest costs but I can tell you that there is a lot of cutting corners or, in the best of cases, many attempts to keep funding where it is, around the world even though we would no doubt need ten times more to screen everyone and treat everyone around the world, Bruno Spire pointed out in a chat organised by Libration, a French newspaper, on 27 November 2009.