Zahid Hussain is a writer and social entrepreneur. He is a regional poetry performance champion and has regularly featured on BBC Radio. In 2009, he launched the Manchester Muslim Writers in response to the lack of support for Muslim writers despite the need for the authentic voice of British Muslims to be heard.

Zahid Hussain teaches creative writing to children and adults and mentors a number of new – and published – writers. He is a member of NAWE (National Association of Writers in Education) and the SOA (Society of Authors). He is also a trustee of BTEG (Black Training & Enterprise Group) and Ecomosque (Salford).

You can follow Zahid on Twitter @zahidsays

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wedged into the bloat of Mankind, it lurks

coiled in the caverns of our insides

and it snares without hooks or nets or clamps

until all of our blood is occupied

and bellowing out, breaths become a blink

ground down by the weight of a dying heart’s pulse

and snaked into the body’s tributaries

the dried blood-tide ropes its territory

its naming has never contained it

no sound has delayed it, and yet we deny it

judging its victims, sinner, demon, beast

until it snatches one of us; too late we know

it has the seared conscience of a desert rock

and born deaf and dumb and bound to nothing

it forever strafes its code in spaces

whose first and final tourist is silence

and despite all the lines of ink we scribe,

it imprints itself and imprints itself and imprints itself

on every nation’s flag; yet it begs no translation,

because death has swallowed all our tongues.

Born in 1959, Cameron obtained an M.A. in the politics of countries that don’t exist anymore. In his desire to change the world he was a local councillor for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham from 1986-2006, being Deputy Leader between 1998-2005 and after four years in the real world was persuaded to stand again for election, which he did successfully in 2010. He is currently the local Cabinet Member for Regeneration. His hobbies include gerbil training, Barking Football Club and being amazed by the world in which he’s privileged to live.

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Of course I knew HIV was still a problem, both in this country and abroad, especially in Africa. Every now and then a passing remark would be made in the mainstream media when discussing a particular country’s national hardships about their HIV infection rate. I would inwardly gasp, but then almost immediately just assume that they must ‘get by’ somehow and continue with the main thrust of the report.

With the advances in medical treatment for HIV, life expectancy for many people who are diagnosed early on in their illness may not be that much lower than average life expectancy in an area. However not everyone is diagnosed early enough in their treatment for good medical care to be effective and that is a particular problem in our part of east London.

Nevertheless, HIV awareness campaigns are so very 1980’s and surely went out of fashion along with the ‘Frankie Says…’ tee-shirts, mullet hairstyles and Liverpool being football league champions.

When I mentioned to friends I’d been asked to write something about HIV there was universal surprise with the general attitude being, “It’s not such a problem these days, is it?”  My response to that was to be honest and admit I didn’t really know…

I had only just been elected onto my local council when the ’AIDS Epidemic!’ headlines were screaming out their warnings in newspapers, magazines, on the television and radio and via a fairly terrifying, if possibly belated, set of public information advertisements eventually produced by a Government that had originally been less worried by what was also initially dubbed a ‘gay plague’.

Every week I would glance at the job vacancies in ‘The Guardian’ and see that their ‘public appointments’ columns were dominated by ‘HIV/AIDS Advisors’. Every local council seemed to be attempting to appoint more AIDS counsellors than their neighbours.

Locally I could quote the infection rates from memory. Then as the years went by…I couldn’t.

And there’s one of the problems with politics and politicians, says I, who remain fascinated by the subject and determined still to defend those who dabble in it. Political power depends on winning elections. The latter is usually determined, as the Bill Clinton campaign team infamously concluded, by ’the economy, stupid!’

Before my political orientation became settled as a teenager I revelled in comparing the different parties’ political manifestoes – I had the Welsh Nationalists’ edition at one election, which was probably unique for a teenager in East London.  I secured the National Front’s on another occasion, which was followed by a visit by a local representative, which spooked me thoroughly! Since then, however, I have encountered only one actual voter, a local vicar, who explained that, for each election, he scrupulously gathers a fair assessment of each parties’ policies before deciding where to put his personal cross of responsibility. Usually…’it’s the economy, stupid!’

So HIV had its day in the sun, just as dangerous dogs, homelessness, looked after children and leylandi hedges did. Then the politicians move on and so does the politics.

The reason why I am so grateful to have been prompted into thinking about HIV, especially locally, for the first time in far too long after being asked to submit this article, came with the briefing I promptly received by my local council’s advisors. They still have the statistics at their fingertips. And they are still grim after all these years.

About half of the people living with HIV in England do so in London. Locally one in every two hundred people I see on my way to the town hall or civic centre is HIV positive, with many having been diagnosed later than is ideal.

The number of people living with HIV in my small part of London grew by 76% between 2004 and 2009. We have 15 children under the age of 15 affected. For those who casually dismissed the illness as ‘a gay plague’ all those years ago, it’s worth noting that the majority of the 480 people became infected after sex between a male and a female.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to remind politicians that their jobs aren’t just about winning elections and the economy. One of my colleagues once denounced our monitoring of looked after children’s dental appointments by explaining that, “No-one on the doorstep has ever asked me how good the council was at giving dental treatment to our kinds in care!” No-one’s ever asked me about how good the council or local health authority is at gathering HIV statistics either.

Perhaps you should?

Does your local MP or councillor know the number of people in their patch who have HIV? Can they name one policy that is being used locally to reduce infection? Do they know of any targets or even whether or not local infection rates are rising of falling? When was the subject last discussed in the local council chamber?

Just asking certain questions can sometimes lead to action. And action is clearly still needed.

***The following post was was originially posted on The President’s Pages hosted by The Humanitarian Forum***

Every day, new questions arise for us to answer – us, our politicians, communities, and leaders. But the unanswered questions people have been raising for the last century remain. I’m wondering who will have the courage to put the answers on the table of humanity.