Since Richard Hollingsworth webcast his life with HIV for the world to see last year, the United Nations estimates that 5.3m people have been infected with the virus.
Not many have followed his webcasting first, but as World Aids Day approaches this Saturday, the internet has now come of age in providing a wealth of resources, advice for friends and family, and possibly even a crumb of comfort for those living with HIV/Aids.
One area that the internet can naturally target is young people who haven't been terrified into safer sex by images of tombstones toppling over on TV public health ads during the 1980s.
According to a report just published by the Schools Health Education Unit in Exeter, despite the inclusion of HIV and Aids on the national curriculum 10 years ago, 40% of 11 year olds have not heard of the virus. Meanwhile, 16% of the 15-year-old boys surveyed in 3,600 schools still thought HIV could be caught from a toilet seat. Yet 1,174 of 15- to 19-year-olds in the UK are HIV positive.
"The internet is very motivating for young people," says Dr David Regis at the Schools Health Education Unit. "We need to make safe sex education cool and the internet is good for diverting young people from the beardie weirdies like me who do the research."
Many initiatives have been set up to target young people, such as the department of health's Mindbodysoul.gov, Health Initiatives for Young People and Whatudo, which aim to put young people in touch with the facts and each other.
There are also touching personal accounts posted at the HIVe weblog. Anabel Kanabus of Avert, the UK's Aids Education Research Trust, points out that as with all things web, the rate of change has been enormous.
"When we set up our website in 1995, there was very little information. Now we get 1.4m hits a week from 100 different countries." The Terrence Higgins Trust, the UK's largest HIV/Aids charity, has not been slow to catch on either, and its website is now a one-stop shop for information , ie helplines. But for more depth of information, the UN Aids site is a solid resource for statistics, information and news: its interactive Aids Clock makes chilling viewing indeed.
However, rather than being a statistic, www.aegis.com may prove a useful source of support with links to alternative medicine sites and chatrooms. The Body.com for example, launched in 1995, now has 15 doctors dispensing advice online and 40,000 documents on HIV-related topics.
There are always tough personal choices to be made when living with HIV and some good advice can be found at www.aliveandwell.org, which gives advice on starting a family, among other things.
Living with the virus with western standards of health care is one thing. Living with the virus in a developing country, quite another. According to the UN, of the 36.1m people living with HIV/Aids, 25.3m are in sub-saharan Africa, but this has not stopped South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, from rocking received wisdom by saying that HIV and Aids are not related.
He is not alone. Those at www.virusmyth.net/aids also believe that since April 23, 1984 when Dr Robert Gallo announced that he had found "the probable cause of HIV", ( there has only been a correlation between the HIV virus and the Aids infection.
The general opinion, however, is that anti-retroviral drugs are successful in suppressing the virus. These drugs are expensive, especially for developing countries. But this year in a landmark case, the Pharmaceuticals Manufacturers Association withdrew court action against the South African government and the Treatment Action Campaign.
The radio has helped spread information about the virus in South Africa but the internet has a long way to go to penetrate the developing world. Yet people in the developed world can also be excluded from online access. To counter this, clinics in south London have provided free internet access since October this year in conjunction with the Terrence Higgins Trust.
World Aids Day, however, is not just about remembering the 22m who have died from HIV-related illnesses. It's about life, and more specifically, the lives of the 36.1m people with the virus worldwide. To this end, there are positive things everyone can do. Crusaid is the UK's largest fundraiser with a host of money-making events (most of which are fun) throughout the year.
If this is too tame, cause a stir with some direct action with ActUP, a group of activists who organise demos in New York and whose website offers civil disobedience training. On the other hand, you may rather cause a stir for World Aids Day down the disco while raising money for charity www.absolutelyglittered.co.uk.
