Annie Lennox
Annie Lennox
Ann "Annie" Lennox, OBEis a Scottish singer, songwriter, political activist and philanthropist. After achieving moderate success in the late 1970s as part of the new wave band The Tourists, she and fellow musician David A. Stewart went on to achieve major international success in the 1980s as Eurythmics. With a total of eight Brit Awards, including Best British Female Artist six times, Lennox has won more than any other female artist. She has also been named the "Brits Champion of...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionPop Singer
Date of Birth25 December 1954
CityAberdeen, Scotland
There's so much stigma around HIV/AIDS. It's a challenging issue, and the people that already have been tested and know their status find it very, very hard to disclose their status, to live with that virus, and to even seek out the kind of information they need. This experience of going to South Africa a decade ago really woke me up to the scale of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, how it was affecting women and their children. I haven't been able to walk away from it.
I'm not living my life under the spotlight for anybody.
We need money to scale up the services that bring medicine to mothers. The United States government's doing that. There's a global fund that's providing money. mothers2mothers provides for mothers who come in who don't have education, who don't have support. mothers2mothers employs mothers with HIV, mothers who were patients recently in the very same facilities. We take those mothers who were patients who've had their babies, we bring them back, we train them, we pay them, to be health care professionals.
When things are starting to work, you get up at five in the morning thinking, what are we going to do today? You stay up until one in the morning getting it done, and then you start the next day with the same energy, because it's working!
In the States, the HIV transmission from mother to child is almost completely preventable - the only mothers who really do transmit it are the ones who don't come in for care. If a mother in the United States or in Europe or in the UK comes to care and gets her medicines, she will have an HIV negative baby. Most people don't know that.
If you do nothing, if a mother doesn't come for care, if she breastfeeds her baby, the chances of the baby getting HIV are about 40%. So it's about the difference between 40% and zero. This is almost totally preventable. But it requires mothers coming for care and getting the medicines they need, and getting the education and support they need.
To try to help people have babies in a healthy way and to celebrate the process of delivering a child which will be healthy is, I think, almost the best part of healthcare.
Women empowering other women.They get the psycho-social support. They become part of a community.
I chose a career in obstetrics and gynecology because there's something about honoring women, honoring the birth process. We all come from women, and there's something extraordinary about the mothers who raised us.
It was very easy for me to dedicate myself to the care of mothers, help them have healthy babies, help them be healthy, help them in a place where they don't have opportunities. Success breeds the excitement to continue going. It's harder to get out of bed when you've failed.
Just having medicine isn't equivalent to medical care. You need the health systems, you need to create the social framework so that people feel safe.
You become really ugly when you become very superficial and self-obsessed.
Each individual is as individual as their fingerprints, and I think that's extraordinary.
The momentum of time is always going forward. You cannot repeat what has been done before. You can't go back.