216 – World AIDS Day 2025

With modern treatment, PrEP, and U=U, it’s easy to assume HIV is “sorted.” This episode of Hide and Seek explains why that story is incomplete — and why World AIDS Day still matters in 2025.

Jon and Craig step through the history of World AIDS Day, from the height of the epidemic through to today’s elimination targets, honouring the activists, clinicians, and communities who transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable condition, and the impact of access schemes for U=U and PrEP. Along the way, we unpack why remembrance isn’t just symbolic — it actively shapes policy, funding, and care.

The discussion tackles ongoing stigma head-on: on dating apps, in clinics, in shared spaces, and in the language people still use (“clean,” “biohazard,” and worse). We explore why stigma remains one of the biggest barriers to testing, disclosure, and wellbeing — even when the science is crystal clear.

From there, the episode looks forward: injectable PrEP, long-acting ART, broadly neutralising antibodies, mRNA research, and what a future cure might realistically look like. Crucially, we centre the role of people living with HIV — whose participation and advocacy underpin every prevention breakthrough we now benefit from.

This is a grounded, respectful, forward-looking episode that connects HIV to broader questions of justice, equity, and community care — and reminds us that ending HIV isn’t just biomedical. It’s social.

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This episode was recorded on the lands of the Yalukut Weelam clan of the Boon Wurrung peoples. We pay our respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.

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