5. Breakthrough

Sam Smith explores how the 1990s brought new, effective treatments for HIV that changed people's lives forever - and hears how peer support networks were a lifeline for women living with HIV in the era before these life saving treatments became available.

When Angelina Namiba was diagnosed with HIV in the early 1990s, she didn't know any other women with the virus. In this episode, she tells the story of how she broke through her isolation and fear to become one of the UK's most prominent advocates for women with HIV - supporting and amplifying their stories and experiences with the charities like Positively UK and the 4M network, a peer-mentoring organisation led by migrant women, that works with mothers with HIV.

Through the first decade and a half of the HIV epidemic, a positive HIV test usually meant you expected to die. But in 1996, life saving treatments were finally discovered, changing HIV forever.

Sam hears from people who were there, about what it was like to see these effective treatments arrive - including how some people struggled to adjust, after years living with a hugely stigmatised virus that they believed would eventually kill them.

In "A Positive Life", singer Sam Smith presents stories of HIV in the UK over the last forty years. They hear from people who remember the earliest years of the AIDS crisis; the grassroots activists and marginalised communities who came together to fight stigma and raise public awareness; and a new generation living with effective treatments for HIV in a radically-changed world.

An Overcoat Media production for BBC Sounds

Producer: Arlie Adlington Assistant Producer: Emma Goswell Executive Producer: Steven Rajam Sound Mixing: Mike Woolley Additional sound design: Emma Barnaby

Special thanks to Hamzaa for letting us use her song 'Someday' in this episode.