With the best ever World AIDS Day now behind us, here�s a quick update of what we achieved this year and the role you�ve played in it.

After months of gathering in the eye photos, a trusty team of volunteers spent the weekend decorating our unique route finder bus with pairs of eyes from up and down the country. On Tuesday 29th, we parked the bus outside ULU and spent the afternoon talking to people about the campaign, gathering more eyeballs and signatures for our World AIDS Day letter and distributing condoms. We were joined by volunteers from Sussex University Stop AIDS Society and their exchange partners from Bangladesh, as well as a team of fab drummers who kept things lively throughout the afternoon.

We promised students their eyeballs would be used to face down key decision makers. On November 30th we had a visit from the PM, Tony Blair, on Wednesday, and he had a very strong sense that he was being watched. The first thing he noticed was that most of the eyes watching him were young people. He said that it was amazing to see a movement for change that was driven by youth and students. Stop AIDS Campaign members lobbied him, on your behalf, on how the 2010 target will be met. We questioned him vigorously on funding, health systems and most importantly TRIPS. We reminded him that no African country has yet used the waiver contained in the TRIPS agreement designed to allow import of cheap generic medicines.

We also presented him with a letter on behalf of the Student Stop AIDS Campaign, setting out the key changes that our generation wants to see, and reminding him that young people around the UK will keep watching the 2010 target. What made this World AIDS Day so fantastic was the huge amount of interest we had from decision makers. Hilary Benn also visited the bus, along with almost 80 MPs, development ministers from all the EU states, health ministers from developing countries and ambassadors from African and Asian embassies here in London. All the MPs talked about the huge number of action cards they�ve had from constituents. They commended our campaign concept, our hard work and our vision of a world where AIDS treatment will be available to all. They�ve promised to keep supporting our campaign, and we�ve promised to continue eyeballing them to make sure they do. All this didn�t happen by chance � it�s happened because of the massive amount of work all of our campaigners have put in, by sending action cards, eyeballing decision makers, and getting out onto the streets to demand universal access by 2010. Because you are so vocal and visible, politicians around the UK now know about our campaign, and more importantly they support it. With an army like this we can win the war against AIDS, so here�s to more eyeballing in 2006.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 18th, 2005 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Campaign News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.