For the past few years, every six months or so I have woken with a small red mark in the crock of my arm and a stinking hangover. For many gay and bisexual men this is not the result of a heavy weekend, but what we call housekeeping: the regular HIV test. And whilst I am armoured with the knowledge that being HIV+ nowadays is no worse than living with diabetes, it still terrifies - hence the hangover.

On Sunday, we mark World AIDS Day.

More than 35m people worldwide have died from complications related to AIDS, according to the World Health Organisation. An estimated 37 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2017. When I was growing up in the 1980s, I presumed that I would be one of them. Death hung heavy over men who had sex with men, as the medical jargon has it, in the two decades spanning the eighties and nineties.

My generation - I’m 46 - wondered whose would be the first funeral we would attend. But it didn’t happen. The introduction of anti-retroviral drugs in 1996 to treat HIV/AIDS, saw the diagnosis of being HIV+ move from being a death sentence to a treatable condition. We were the lucky ones. But only just.

Of my closest 10 gay male friends today, five are HIV+. Whilst so many of the previous generation died - and to this day I am still horrified by how many lost their lives - today we are propped up by pills. Stigma, not death, is the battle we in the global west face today. For many parts of the so-called developing world, however, including Africa and eastern Europe, transmission rates of HIV continue to rocket. Read more via Openly