Birmingham City FC have filed an online story about the club and its players supporting Saving Lives. Wearing t-shirts during warm-up at the weekend, the team have shown real enthusiasm for helping spread the Saving Lives messages. They even signed their shirts! You can find the online piece here – it has plenty of photographs of our Ambassador, Curtis Davies, and his other teammates. The text can be read below, and we have more photos of our own at our Blues club page.
The entire Blues squad got shirty before last weekend’s FA Cup with Budweiser tie against Wolves to launch a new public health charity, Saving Lives.
All of the players donned t-shirts bearing the Saving Lives logo in the warm-up ahead of the game, as did all of the Wolves lads too.
Saving Lives is a new charity with the aim of promoting HIV testing – the only way for anyone to know for sure if they are living with the infection. Awareness of HIV, and of the importance of testing for it, remains low.
One in four of those with HIV in the UK do not know they are infected. By 2012, that will be 25,000 people or more who are unable to access the life-saving treatment available today, and who may be unknowingly transmitting the infection to their partners.
Saving Lives aims to communicate to a much broader audience than is usually exposed to HIV education – and hopefully make the issue a more mainstream topic of discussion.
Birmingham City defender Curtis Davies, one of the players who is an advocate for the charity and who also carried the message earlier last week in a pre-match press conference, said: “Saving Lives is a good cause with a great message. I’m happy to help spread the word as best I can.”
“The people who die of HIV in this country today are those who are diagnosed late,” added Dr Steve Taylor, the charity’s Medical Director. “People are dying because of a reluctance to test. We can save those lives, and prevent new infections, simply by increasing the number of people we test. Saving lives really is that simple.”
As well as the Saving Lives t-shirts, the messages of Saving Lives featured in the matchday programme and here on bcfc.com in the lead-up to the match.
