A public health campaign which made itself felt in print.

I have AIDS. Please hug me, I can't make you sick.

J Keeler, Germany, c.1987

Wellcome Library/Wellcome Images

This German poster uses the image of a child with AIDS to publicise a local AIDS information hotline. The image itself, one of a child appealing for help both expresses the vulnerability of everyone, including children, to the HIV virus and conveys the important message that HIV cannot be caught through casual bodily contact.

The child is one of the most famous and widely used images of early informational posters about HIV and AIDS. The German version is a repurposing of the original, which was produced not by an AIDS charity, but by the Center for Attitudinal Healing, a Californian New Age organisation founded in the 1970s. Its inspiration was the case of Ryan White, a haemophiliac teenager who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and whose subsequent battle against exclusion by the school system made headlines.