A ‘Happy New Spring’ to you all and first, if the winter seems never-ending and you didn’t get a Valentine, first go to A winter of discontent?, which has some suggestions from Living Well about getting a little sunshine back into your life.

There’s good news of an historic nature in this issue too. As you may have heard, for the first time doctors appear to have permanently cured someone of HIV infection (see Towards a cure for all). This particular cure won’t be possible for most people with HIV, but it shows it can be done. This is, potentially, such an important event that we’ve split the piece in two: this month you can hear about how they cured Timothy Ray Brown and what the challenges are to doing the same for others; next month, we look at promising leads being followed up in what is a new wave of optimism about curing HIV.

We allow ourselves to celebrate a bit of home-grown good news too, in From Kenya to Kennington. Grants from the Big Lottery Fund and the Henry Smith Charity have enabled NAM to employ Jackie Ayugi as a Communities Engagement Officer. Her job is to help us develop closer ties with, and information better suited to, the African communities in the UK. This work has allowed us to produce a new resource, HIV and UK African Communities, which is out soon. Jackie writes about the similarities and differences between here and Kenya from her perspective as someone who knows a lot about the impact of HIV in both countries.

The main feature in this issue of HTU is about current and future changes to disability benefits (see What's happening to benefits?). Losing benefit is not good news for anyone who may be relying on Incapacity Benefit and/or Disability Living Allowance to make ends meet. There’s no getting round the fact that the toughening-up of the benefits system will result in some people with HIV needing to seek work with a nasty long gap in their CV and in a bad climate for jobhunting.

Yes, research shows repeatedly that working is good for you. Unemployed people generally die younger and are less happy than people with a job, and HTU intends to return to the subject of finding work later in the year.  

Yet coming off benefits and entering the workplace after perhaps two decades or more of uncertain health and poor morale may feel like jumping from a plane without knowing if you have a parachute. The concern is that people with HIV will be thrust off benefit without any of the re-entry training that’s supposed to be part of the new Employment and Support Allowance, and so far statistics seem to confirm this.

Criticism of the new Work Capability Assessment by HIV organisations has already led to changes that take more account of the impact of illnesses like HIV. That’s why it’s important to tell us about your experience of being assessed – see the article for more on how to let us know.