The Aids Support Organization (TASO)

November 11, 2020 marks 33 years since the founders of TASO formed the first support group for people living with HIV and AIDS in Uganda at the Mulago Major Referral Hospital, Kampala. In 1986/7, while Uganda was recovering from a war with a new Government in place, a group of people, some of whom were infected while others had lost friends and family to AIDS, came together to form a support group which was then registered in 1991 as The AIDS Support Organisation (TASO). The first clients were patients who had been abandoned by the relatives either on a hospital bed or laying on the grass in the hospital compound where not even health workers were willing to help them. While these patients had different faces, family history and cultural background, they had one thing in common, they had a disease which nobody could identify.