The number of people living with HIV in Britain will top 100,000 for the first time next year.The toll of those infected announced by the Health Protection Agency (HPA), is revealed as the world marks 30 years since the first cases of the disease were diagnosed.

The growing number of British HIV patients is due to the spread of the disease within the UK, as opposed to infections acquired abroad.

The amount of people contracting the disease in Britain each year has doubled in the past decade, with some 3,800 diagnosed last year.

Epidemiologists at the HPA now predict that there will be more than 100,000 HIV-positive people – diagnosed and undiagnosed – in Britain by the end of 2012.

Health professionals said yesterday that Britain’s progress towards this figure is more of a cause for optimism than it might first appear. They argued that the high numbers illustrate that in three decades, HIV has moved from something akin to a death sentence to a condition that – if managed – can allow sufferers a normal life expectancy.

Dr Valerie Delpech, the HPA’s head of national HIV surveillance, said: “It’s remarkable to be heading towards 100,000 people alive with HIV. In the early days, when we were diagnosing we were also counting as many deaths. That’s changed dramatically. It’s an extraordinary leap in medicine, that means we’ve gone from a fatal disease to a manageable chronic disease with a normal life expectancy – if you catch it early.”

Since the first cases were discovered in Los Angeles 30 years ago, 115,000 people have been diagnosed in the UK. Of these, 27,000 have developed full-blown Aids and 20,000 have died.

But prevention is still a cause for concern as the doubling of cases suggests that safe sex campaigns are not hitting home.

Despite the increase in the number of diagnoses, the budget for HIV services in London has been cut by 20 per cent: the chief executives of London primary care trusts slashed spending for 2011-12 by £516,000, prompting protests from public health experts.

The majority of new infections are diagnosed in gay men or in people who contracted the disease while abroad, although the number of heterosexuals diagnosed is also increasing.

If all the UK-acquired infections were prevented, some £1.2bn could be saved in lifetime treatment costs.

Sir Nick Partridge, chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust, said: “Clearly, we want to do better in HIV prevention in the UK, particularly among gay men. The numbers would be much higher if we hadn’t had the prevention campaigns of the past 25 years, and nine out of 10 gay men now use condoms.

“But in the past 10 years there’s been a year-on-year decrease in local funding of HIV prevention work. The national programme has been sustained, but cutting local services adds to the invisibility of HIV.”

Although the condition is now manageable if retroviral drugs are available and there is an early diagnosis, a cure is still a long way off, and patients in many countries do not have access to any treatment.

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/hiv-thirty-years-after-the-first-diagnosis-britain-heads-for-100000-cases

A doubling of new HIV infections in the UK in the past decade is leading experts to tell GPs to offer testing to all adult male patients in some areas.
The Health Protection Agency data shows new UK-acquired cases rose from just under 2,000 in 2001 to nearly 3,800 in 2010.

Many of these new cases are among men who have sex with men and it is this group that campaigners hope to target.

The National Institute for Curbing Expenditure (NICE) has launched new guidelines for doctors in England.

NICE says GPs should now offer and recommend HIV testing to all men who register with a practice in an area with a large community of men who have sex with men or an area that has a high prevalence of HIV – meaning more than two diagnosed cases per 1,000 people.

Increased testing should help stop the spread of HIV by identifying men at risk, NICE believes.

Men who have sex with men remain the group most at risk of becoming infected with HIV.

New diagnoses in this group alone have increased by 70% in the past 10 years.

There are more than 30,000 men who have sex with men living with HIV in the UK and experts estimate nearly a third of these are currently undiagnosed and unaware that they are infected.

Another high-risk group that would benefit from increased HIV testing, according to NICE, is the black African community living in England.

In 2009, more than 2,000 black Africans were diagnosed with an HIV infection, one-third of all new diagnoses in the UK.

Some of the Primary Care Trusts in England where HIV prevalence greatly exceeds two per 1,000

* Brighton And Hove City PCT
* Camden PCT
* City And Hackney Teaching PCT
* Hammersmith And Fulham PCT
* Islington PCT
* Lambeth PCT
* Newham PCT
* Manchester Teaching PCT
* Southwark PCT

Professor Mike Kelly from NICE said: “HIV is still a serious problem in this country, with a large proportion of people unaware they are infected.

“This new guidance from NICE makes a number of practical recommendations which aim to increase HIV testing by encouraging healthcare professionals to offer it routinely to people in areas where there are a high number of people living with HIV.”

This would include parts of large cities like London and Manchester, as well as areas like Brighton and Hove.

Dr Valerie Delpech, head of HIV surveillance at the HPA, said: “These expanded HIV testing policies should be prioritised for implementation as soon as possible.

“The impact of late diagnosis is clearly demonstrated when you look at deaths among people with HIV – three out of five of HIV-positive individuals that die are diagnosed too late to gain the most health benefits from their treatment, like increased life expectancy.”

HIV charities said the guidelines were a “vital step forward”.

From: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12817564

HIV infections among the over 50s have more than doubled in seven years.
The number of new cases per year recorded in England, Wales and Northern Ireland rose from 299 to 710 between 2000 and 2007, research has shown.

Half were diagnosed late, increasing the risk of an early death from Aids.

Among younger age groups, a third have the HIV infection identified at a similar level of progression.

During the study period, three quarters of deaths among HIV-infected people aged 50 and over occurred within a year of diagnosis.

Compared with younger adults carrying the virus, older people were significantly more likely to have been infected through sex with men.

Older “straight” adults were more likely to acquire the virus in the UK, but there was evidence of white heterosexual men picking up the infection abroad.

Ruth Smith, a senior HIV scientist at the Health Protection Agency’s Centre for Infections, said: “We estimate that nearly half of older adults diagnosed between 2000 and 2007 were infected at age 50 or over and this highlights the importance of HIV testing – whatever your age.

“We must continually reinforce the safe sex message – using a condom with all new or casual partners is the surest way to ensure people do not become infected with a serious sexually transmitted infection such as HIV.”

The findings are published online in the journal AIDS and were presented today at the International Aids Conference in Vienna.

HPA data shows there are more than 83,000 people in the UK living with HIV, a quarter of whom do not know they are infected.

In 2008 there were 7,382 new HIV diagnoses in the UK with an estimated 32% over the age of 15 being diagnosed late.

A late diagnosis of HIV infection is defined as having a CD4 white blood cell count of less than 200 cells per cubic millimetre of blood. Healthy individuals have CD4 counts of 500 and above.

CD4 cells are a key part of the immune system. When their numbers fall too low, a person becomes vulnerable to infection.

Study co-author Valerie Delpech, head of HIV surveillance at the HPA, said: “Although adults aged 50 and over account for just 8% of all new HIV diagnoses, the fact that cases have more than doubled in recent years serves as a timely reminder that anybody is at risk of HIV infection if they do not use protection and practise safe sex.

“HIV remains a serious infection particularly when diagnosed late. The fact that we’ve seen an increase in the number of older adults getting diagnosed, and in particular getting diagnosed late, highlights the need for raised awareness in that age group.”

“Medical guidelines issued in 2008 encouraged widespread testing in areas where there is a high prevalence of HIV and the HPA fully supports any NHS or charity organisation initiative which will encourage increased testing and increased offering of testing across the UK.”

From: http://www.independent.co.uk/hiv-infection-rate-in-over-50s-doubles

NHS hospitals have quietly created banks of DNA from blood taken from millions of newborn babies without the proper consent of their parents.Freedom of information (FOI) requests to hospitals around Britain have established that the blood samples, taken in heel-prick tests to screen for serious conditions, have been privately stored by parts of the NHS since 1984.

According to guidance obtained by The Sunday Times, the DNA can be looked at by police, coroners and some medical researchers. They are able to identify named individuals.

This weekend Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, was under pressure to order an inquiry into why the NHS appeared to have acted without securing proper consent from parents.

Mothers of newborns are given a leaflet that academic experts say fails to make clear the distinction between consent for vital clinical tests to safeguard a baby’s health and for the use of the baby’s DNA in medical research and police inquiries.

Dr Helen Wallace, director of GeneWatch, a pressure group, said: “Giving mothers a leaflet does not amount to informed consent. No one who has just given birth is in a state to understand the full implications of how their baby’s genome might be used in future.”

The standard leaflet simply explains that the stored blood samples can be used “for research to help improve the health of babies and their families in the UK”.

Up to 4m samples are being held at four of the 16 centres licensed to hold newborns’ bloodspots in the UK, according to the FOI responses. More than 700,000 babies are screened each year.

The police and coroners can apply for access to the infant blood samples, which contain individual DNA, to identify people involved in crimes.

Private medical companies and researchers working for the NHS are also able to access the samples, although most of the research is anonymous and done by the NHS after approval by an ethics committee. The bloodspots have been used for genetic research and mass screening for diseases such as HIV in babies’ mothers.

The UK Newborn Screening Programme Centre, which oversees the use of samples, says that some of the bloodspots can be linked to other information, such as hospital admission records, which identifies the individual.

Government guidance says the bloodspots should be kept for at least five years, but hospitals vary widely in their practices.

Central Manchester University Hospitals Trust has 1m samples in storage dating from 1984. About 250,000 further samples are stored in the hospital’s laboratory. It plans to store them indefinitely.

Cambridge University Hospitals Trust retains samples for 18 years. It stores 400,000 samples at Endex archives in Ipswich, with a further 62,800 samples kept in hospital labs.

Great Ormond Street hospital in London began storing samples in 1990 and preserves them for at least 20 years. It screens and stores the samples of about 120,000 babies a year.

It confirmed that it had occasionally handed samples to coroners but not to the police.

Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool, which was at the centre of a scandal over the retention of children’s organs, has 145,000 samples in storage. It receives about 29,000 samples per year. It destroys all samples after five years.

Dr Jane Kaye, director of the centre for health, law and emerging technologies at Oxford University, said: “It is very difficult to get samples like this to do public health screening. It is an enormous resource. But the problem is that this needs to be done properly and with proper consent. At the moment people are not being asked to sign a consent form or make a distinction between what is for their own child’s health and the fact that this may be used for other purposes.”

The samples are taken from babies, aged 5-8 days, to test for conditions such as sickle cell disorders, cystic fibrosis and phenylketonuria.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the pressure group, said that hospitals might face legal claims.

“As someone who gave consent for my own baby to be tested, I’m horrified that anyone would breach my trust, keep my child’s sample for years on end and use it for all sorts of extraneous purposes.

“If they think that thrusting a leaflet in an exhausted new mother’s hand creates informed consent, they can look forward to a flurry of claims under article 8 of the Human Rights Act.

“Liberty is writing to the new health secretary to ask for an urgent investigation.”

From: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article7134061.ece