Profile - Nick Partridge

Profile - Nick Partridge - Published in The Sunday Times July 13th 2008

When rumours that a frightening new disease was killing gay men in America first surfaced in the early 1980s, Nick Partridge - now director of the Terrence Higgins Trust - was working in Amsterdam.

“I was fearful and horrified by the prospect of something that was completely unknown, but was killing people very quickly.” These early intimations spurred him back to London where he soon began working with the newly founded Trust, named after the first known British victim.

Twenty-five years later Terrence Higgins is Europe’s largest HIV and Aids charity and works in a very different landscape.

Aids has killed 25 million people around the world and there are 2.5 million new cases of HIV each year. But in developed countries HIV is now largely a chronic condition controlled by powerful antiretroviral drugs.

Partridge, 52, who earns £85,000 annually, has been director since 1991. This week he returned from a UN gathering in New York about the global Aids situation.

Terrence Higgins is now part of Britain’s health establishment and Partridge divides his time between the Trust and working as deputy chair of the UK Clinical Research Collaboration, as a member of the Healthcare Commission and chairing INVOLVE which promotes public involvement in public health, NHS and social care research.

Meetings in London and Manchester with these organisations form key parts of his week together with the enjoyable business of attending the Trust’s annual fundraising gala dinner.

Partridge says he once believed the Trust would disappear when a cure and vaccine for Aids were found. “But research on this has stalled. I don’t now believe we will see either in our lifetime.”

The work of the Trust has changed after two watershed dates. In 1991 Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury died from AIDS. A million pounds in royalties from the re-released “Bohemian Rhapsody”, donated to the Trust gave it financial security.

More importantly Mercury’s death – and the Princess of Wales’s involvement in Aids issues - broadened public understanding.

But Partridge says by then he was close to emotional burn-out and would have quit had it not been for the development of effective antiretroviral drugs treatments in 1996.

“This was extraordinary. The numbers of people dying dropped by over 70 per cent in just 18 months. To see that dawning realization that people were going to live and not die was absolutely fabulous.”

But it also meant the Trust completely re-thinking its purpose. “Our services now reflect a very different relationship. They’re tailored around moments of crisis – such as the initial diagnosis or going on to treatment.”

A new challenge is sustaining awareness. A third of people with HIV in Britain don’t know they have the infection.

“There is a worryingly low level of HIV knowledge and that is where having proper and effective sex education in schools is vital. We have failed to do this and to equip each new generation to understand the risk around HIV and to better enjoy their journey into sex and relationships.”