In the morning at the London Assembly’s Health Committee there was one of those really rare moments – when the evidence given by witnesses is riveting and new.

We are carrying out an investigation into AIDS /HIV in London – it is rising and these days unheard and unseen compared to its arrival on the scene years ago. Then we were all terrified by the unknown quantity it presented and haunted by our pasts.

One of the witnesses from one of the voluntary agencies was giving her own experience of being an African woman, HIV positive, arriving in this country with children – and how hard it was to deal with such a stigmatised illness, particularly coming from a culture where such things are not discussed and certainly not discussed with ones children.