More than 1,200 people in Fiji were diagnosed with HIV the first six months of 2025, making the island nation's HIV epidemic the fastest growing in the world. The UN says Fiji’s location as a drug-running hub and escalating local methamphetamine use has fuelled the rapid spread, coupled with unsafe injecting practices and a lack of access to clean needles. Low health awareness, cultural stigma and inadequate testing and treatment are exacerbating the crisis.

The names and voices of Mirry, Francine, Andi, Clare, Isac and Nemaia have been changed to protect their identities

• Drugs, denial and stigma: the babies and children swept up in Fiji’s HIV nightmare

Vulnerable young people, partners of drug users and victims of sexual violence also among those afflicted in world’s fastest growing HIV epidemic

The night her baby’s heart stopped, Clare* blamed herself. Had she taken her out in the cold too much? Had she damaged her lungs by drinking iced water when she was pregnant? She fixated on Andi’s tiny chest, willing it to suck in air, rushing her to hospital in Fiji for the second time in as many days.

All through the early hours Andi* clung to life. Doctors performed CPR several times, puncturing the month-old baby’s chest to insert a drain, removing fluid from around her lungs. “She was really, really sick and they didn’t know what was going on … she was getting weaker and weaker,” Clare says. She sat by her daughter’s bedside. She prayed.

While other countries are deep in a sex recession, the Danish drive shows no signs of stalling. How do they stay so frisky?

Copenhagen on the Thursday before Valentine’s Day is intoxicatingly romantic. That’s not hyperbole – you could breathe in and be drunk on it. The canals have frozen over, which only happens about once every 13 years, and couples are skating on them. You can see cosy bars from miles away because they’re strung with fairy lights – apparently not just a Christmas thing here. Everyone is beautiful.

But none of that comes close to explaining why young Danes in Denmark, unlike gen Z across the developed world, are still having sex. Winter isn’t even their frisky season. “You feel the atmosphere in the springtime,” says Ben, 35, half-British, half Danish. His friend Anna, also 35, originally Hungarian, says: “Post-hibernation fever, you can feel the sexual energy. Everyone is on. Everyone swims in the canals, a lot of the women will be topless – they’re like herrings.” (Which is to say: they are typically Danish, they love the water and they don’t wear clothes … I think.) Ben and Anna are millennials, of course, rather than gen Z: they provide the outsiders’ perspective.

Gay porn in the 80s was home to beautifully moody synth music that is only now getting rediscovered – tragically too late for many of its creators

Michael Ely knew from the first moment he met James Allan Taylor that he had found someone special. The pair had separately hitchhiked to a gay bar, with fake IDs, in Sunset Beach, California. They connected, they danced and stepped outside for a kiss in the thick fog. “I was only 18 but I knew I had just met my soulmate,” says Ely.

The pair remained a couple until 2015 when Taylor, who was nicknamed Spider, died from liver cancer. A new collection of Taylor’s music, Surge Studio Music – electronic pieces he composed for gay porn films – has just been released. “I was like: wait, there’s a fanbase for 80s gay porn music?” laughs Ely. “I had no idea. When Josh contacted me, I found the cassette tapes in a box in the back of the closet. They’d been there for ever.”

In Oscar-shortlisted documentary short Cashing Out, a little-known industry that saw dying LGBTQ+ people sell their life insurance policies is remembered

During the summer of 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic, the documentary director Matt Nadel was back home in Boca Raton, Florida. He remembers one particular evening walk that he took with his father, Phil, as they weathered out those early months.

As they strode through the neighborhood, Nadel, now 26, said that the prospect of a vaccine was exciting, but the idea of pharmaceutical executives profiting off a devastating virus left him feeling uneasy. Phil grew concerned by the complex ethical predicament that his son laid out, and Nadel could quickly tell that his father was acting strangely.

Over the holiday period, the Guardian leader column is looking ahead at the themes of 2026. Today we examine how the White House’s war on vaccines has left the future of a key technology uncertain and up for grabs

The late scientist and thinker Donald Braben argued that 20th-century breakthroughs arose from scientists being free to pursue bold ideas without pressure for quick results or rigid peer review. The rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines seemed to validate his claim: emergency conditions sped up trials, relaxed regulatory sequencing and encouraged scientists to share findings before peer review. Out of that sprang one of the great scientific success stories of our age: mRNA vaccines. These use synthetic genetic code to train the immune system to defend itself against viruses. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, whose work enabled the mRNA Covid vaccine, went on to win the Nobel prize. Their breakthrough suggests that loosening traditional constraints could accelerate major scientific advances.

The extensive scientific and logistic infrastructure built during that period is now occupied with turning the technology towards other diseases: flu, HIV and even cancer. Until very recently, the US, which put more than $10bn into mRNA development, appeared primed to reap the scientific and commercial rewards. Despite the deregulatory zeal that birthed mRNA, the second Trump administration has rejected it. Instead, it has been remarkably steady in its commitment to the radical anti-science and anti-vaccine agenda of the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. He has spent the past year undermining and outright sabotaging the US’s own success. Over the summer, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced a “coordinated wind-down” of federal funding for mRNA research, cancelling an additional $500m in funding for 22 projects.

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From HIV to TB, scientists and doctors made breakthroughs in treatment and prevention of some of the world’s deadliest diseases

With humanitarian funding slashed by the US and other countries, including the UK, this year’s global health headlines have made grim reading. But good things have still been happening in vaccine research and the development of new and improved treatments for some of the most intractable illnesses.

Researchers now describe it as both historical phenomenon and public health model. Its success was remarkable

• Past/Present is a column which places current events in historical context

Aids has always been laden with political and emotional volatilities. The possibility of blood- or sex-based transmission combined with its first emergence among marginalised and criminalised populations created a potent mix of primal terror and terrifying prejudice.

It can sometimes be difficult to remember just how potently misinformation, fear and outright hostility framed the knowledge and experience of Aids in the first decade or so of the pandemic. In this period, a positive result on an HIV test was a terminal diagnosis and medical knowledge about transmission and treatment was still cloudy.

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Labour announces prevention programme as well as efforts to re-engage people who have fallen out of medical care

Ending new HIV transmissions in England by 2030 is within reach thanks to an action plan that will include routine testing at A&Es, the government has said.

The HIV action plan, to be unveiled on World Aids Day on Monday, aims to re-engage the thousands of people who have left HIV care, bringing them back to lifesaving treatment. The £170m package also includes funding for opt-out HIV testing at A&Es during routine blood tests in areas with the highest rates, including London and Manchester.

Administration said ‘awareness is not a strategy’, but here is a short list of orders the president has signed to do just that

For the first time since 1988 the US government said it will no longer commemorate World Aids Day, which honors those who have lost their lives to the disease, celebrates efforts to combat the epidemic and raises awareness.

“An awareness day is not a strategy,” a state department spokesperson, Tommy Pigott, told the New York Times.

State department has told employees and grant recipients to not publicly promote or make event on 1 December

For the first time since 1988, the US government will no longer commemorate World Aids Day, according to reports.

The state department has directed its employees and grant recipients not to use US government funds to mark the event – which falls annually on 1 December – and not to promote the day publicly. The news was first reported by the journalist Emily Bass and confirmed in an email viewed by the New York Times.

World leaders pledge just over $11bn, short of the $18bn experts say is needed to stay on track to tackle challenges

Control of the deadly infectious diseases HIV, tuberculosis and malaria “hangs in the balance” after a shortfall in donations to a leading global health fund, advocates have warned.

Only $11.3bn of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria’s $18bn (£14bn) targeted budget for 2026 to 2028 has been confirmed so far.

UK expected to reduce contribution to Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria by 20%

A group of seven Labour MPs who served as ministers under Keir Starmer have written to the prime minister warning that an expected cut to UK funding for aid to combat preventable diseases would be both a “moral failure” and a strategic disaster.

With ministers and officials expected to decide the UK’s contribution to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria within days, the letter renews pressure on Starmer to pull back from an expected 20% cut.