Aides

Gala dinner to mark the anti-Aids association’s 25th birthday (November 28 2009)

On Saturday November 28 2009 — three days before World Aids Day – France’s oldest anti-Aids association Aides held its annual gala dinner beneath the glass ceiling of the main hall of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.  Five hundred guests including such figures as Pierre Cardin and Jean Paul Gaultier  were invited to the event, which was hosted by former health minister Simone Veil and Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the Nobel prize-winner for medicine and co-discoverer of the HIV virus.  After a concert by Jane Birkin, the art expert Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr  conducted the now ritual tombola auction to raise funds for the charity.  As this was its 25th anniversary, Aides also used the occasion of World Aids Day to release a new book entitled simply   Aids.   With photographs by Barbara Pellerin and text by the journalist Eric Favereau, who has been writing on Aids for Libération newspaper for the last quarter century,  the book (published by Cherche-Midi press) is a series of profiles of people engaged in the fight against Aids. ‘Fighters is the key word,” Michel Bourrely, who devised the book, told 20 Minutes newspaper. “Just like in older times when the army was defeated it was ordinary citizens who came together to fight the common enemy.  Since 1984 the fighters against Aids have been fired by the same fuel.”   According to Aides president Bruno Spire, writing in the same newspaper,  “Many battles have now been won.  The first victory has been in the field of treatments,  which are now increasingly effective.  We’ve also  made advances in the field of prevention.  In the future, we are going to pay much more attention to the social situation  of HIV-sufferers because many are living beneath the poverty line. The one area where we still lag way behind is in the attitude of society towards sufferers.  Today you can tell your neighbour that you suffer from asthma, no problem. But tell him you have Aids and it is a different matter.”  Twenty-six years after the virus was discovered by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Luc Montagnier, Willy Rosenbaum, Françoise Brun-Vésinet and Jean-Claude Chermann  at the  Pasteur Institute in Paris, 6,800 people continue to be infected every day.  And two million die every year.