Shaun Mellors collapsed on the job at a Cape Town hotel and was taken to a hospital. After a cursory examination, a doctor told him, "You have AIDS and you have six months to live."
The doctor was wrong, on both counts. While Mellors did have HIV, seven years later he has not developed AIDS.Today, Mellors strives to teach black South Africans that AIDS does not just strike gay white men like himself. It's an urgent task in a country where the vast majority of AIDS cases are blacks who contracted the virus from heterosexual relations.
Many people are ignorant about how the disease is spread, he said.
"You still get people leaving food outside hospital rooms instead of going in, wearing gloves, taking your temperature," Mellors said in an interview at the 8th International Conference on AIDS in Africa, which ended Thursday.
Mellors, 28, was assistant food and beverage manager when he collapsed, suffering from swollen glands and diarrhea.
The doctor asked him if he was homosexual. "I said yes." The answer prompted the immediate, and uninformed, diagnosis.
He lost the job.
Since then, he's been active in AIDS organizations and corporate education at oil firms, banks, airlines and universities.