RIO DE JANEIRO -- "People are still afraid of those three letters," says Gareth Thomas, a former Welsh rugby star. Thomas became a global champion for people living with HIV when he announced that he was HIV positive in 2019. Since then, he has been a strong advocate for sharing knowledge about the virus –- and what it's like to live with it.
This summer, he came to Rio de Janeiro to participate in the International AIDS Conference and to spread his message as part of the Tackle HIV campaign. That message resonates with another advocate: Welton Gabriel, a 36-year-old event organizer from Sao Paolo. Sitting in a bar overlooking the world-famous Ipanema beach, Welton Gabriel recalled the night 12 years earlier when he learned he had tested positive for HIV.
"I thought I was gonna die," he remembers. For a while, his life did hang in the balance. Gabriel had contracted a treatment-resistant strain of HIV — he believes that the sexual partner who infected him had been taking medication but decided to stop, allowing the virus to mutate.
It took seven months before doctors were able to get the infection under control. "The amount of virus in my body was really high," he says. "I was initially started on a medicine that gave me a lot of problems with my liver, and my eyes became yellow.
But then I was changed to the treatment that I am still on, which is working." Despite the trauma he'd endured, and the fact that his condition was under control, when Gabriel chose to tell close friends that he was HIV positive, many cut contact. "They did not want to talk with me," recalls Gabriel, who lives in São Paulo. Such discrimination remains one of the biggest hurdles to ending AIDS as a public-health threat in Brazil, a country of about 214 million which has the greatest number of people living with HIV in Latin America — nearly 1.1 million.
While Brazil's public healthcare system provides free access to medications that can suppress HIV and prevent transmission, allowing people to live normally, many still face a lifetime of stigma. Research from UNAIDS Brazil, a nonprofit that works closely with government agencies in the country, suggests that more than half of all HIV positive individuals in the country have experienced some form of discrimination. Gabriel lost friends, and others have been excluded by their own family or denied opportunities at work after disclosing their HIV status.
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