Rio Calling: Medical Progress vs Lived Reality

**CROWDFUNDER LINK** **Featuring:** Dr Tristan Barber (BHIVA), Antonio Flores, Damien Fagan (Gilead), ICWAP, Thorne Harbour Health, Derrick Mapp, Laura Walters (Gilead / NHS Royal Free Hospital), Luca Stevenson, Joan Stephen, Axel Bautista (Mpact Global Action), Derrick Powell, Brenda Crabtree, Maxx Boykin, Eliane Becks Nininahazwe, Fatima Hassan. Plus archive from Anthony Bird, Jim Vogiatzis, Mark S King and Chris Smith. The drugs worked, but conversations are rarely happened about what comes next. Dan Hall and dan glass spend Day Four of AIDS 2026 exploring the gap between the headline and the aftermath, with Dr Tristan Barber of BHIVA bookending the episode on managing a condition nobody's lived with this long before. Archive testimony comes from **Anthony Bird**, diagnosed in 1995 after an illness that nearly killed him, on an ordinary life once the side effects settled down; **Jim Vogiatzis** on the peripheral neuropathy that combination therapy left behind; **Mark S King**, an American writer and activist diagnosed in 1985, on the strange guilt of surviving after a decade spent preparing to die; and **Chris Smith**, Britain's first openly gay MP and the first parliamentarian to disclose his HIV status, on facing an uncertain future nearly forty years in. **Links** - BHIVA - HIV i-Base - AIDS 2026, the 26th International AIDS Conference - Positively UK, National Long Term Survivors Group - George House Trust, HIV support and peer mentoring **Thanks** Adam Price, Alix Fox, Anonymous, Apostolos James Vogiatzis, Bryn Gay, Careen Hertzog, Emma20Cole, Garry Brough, Moray Laing, Peter Staley, Philippe Cahill, Ross Fletcher, Sarah Schulman, Simon Collins, Siobhán Allison, Soleta Rogan, Tom McKitterick This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp