As paramedics treated a man in a car crash, a spotlight was shone on a need for change

In 1986, two ambulance workers in Oldham were embroiled in a so-called ‘Aids scare’ after treating a man involved in a car crash.

Emergency measures were put into place for the paramedics after the man was confirmed to be living with HIV - with the vehicle locked away and withdrawn from duty, equipment quarantined and the two men undergoing ‘safety checks’.

It was later reported in the Manchester Evening News that the scare was ‘over’, with the staff members' chances of catching the disease described as ‘remote’. But that coverage lingered on in the minds of many Mancunians. And it lingered alongside more-extreme examples like the John Hurt-narrated advert featuring toppling oversized tombstones warning people not to die of ignorance.

Some eight years earlier, Paul Fairweather, a prominent LGBTQ+ and HIV activist, had just moved to Manchester to work for the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), which was the main gay rights organisation in the city at the time.

Paul, who awarded an MBE in the King’s New Year Honours List in 2023, was also at the forefront of the local response to the growing HIV pandemic in Manchester and across the North West helping to organise meetings, writing articles in the gay press, like Mancunian Gay magazine, and lobbying for much-needed support services for those diagnosed.

Paul was one of the six people who founded the Manchester AIDSLine in 1985 - one of only a handful of services across the entire country at the time that provided peer support, advice and mentorship.

“In those early days, it was very unclear how HIV was transmitted,” Paul, now 68, explains to the M.E.N. “There was quite a lot of ignorance and fear, and a lot of people wrongly thought in the mid-80s that it only affected