Hello and welcome to the witness podcast with me Mike Lanchin.

Today we go back to the late 1980s when the British government became the first in the world

to launch a public health campaign on the dangers of HIV AIDS. It was a highly controversial move.

I've been speaking to Norman Fowler, the man behind the British AIDS campaign.

There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all. It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.

The virus can be passed during sexual intercourse with an

infected person. Anyone can get it. Man or woman. I didn't have many gay friends. I have now, but I didn't then. I knew nothing,

very little about the gay world and what was happening there. It just seemed to me that we were the only people who could protect the public and prevent

deaths from taking place.

In the mid-1980s, HIV AIDS was seen primarily as a gay disease, but Britain's health

minister Norman Fowler had spent months arguing and cajoling to convince his colleagues

that everyone was at risk.

So far it's been confined to small groups, but it's spreading.

So protect yourself.

This hard-hitting TV advert with its thunderous music,

images of a tombstone and booming warnings, was the centerpiece of Norman Fowler's

unprecedented publicity campaign.

We thought that the level of threat was getting increasingly more dangerous.

There were a relatively small number of cases in the hundreds not the thousands but all the

forward planning and estimates we made showed that unless action was taken you

were going to get 20,000 cases within a very short space of time.

The headlines tonight, by the year 2000, every family in Britain could be affected in some way

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