THE RATE at which people are diagnosed with HIV more than doubled in Europe between 2000 and 2008, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported yesterday. That long-term trend is also reflected in the continuing rise in infection rates in recent Irish experience – figures this week from Dublin’s St James’s Hospital record the highest number of new cases in a year on record, a 20 per cent increase in positive diagnoses.
The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has reported some 210 new cases in the first half of 2009, up from 193 in the previous six months. Some 5,453 people in the Republic are now living with HIV.
The largest increase is among men who have sex with men. New cases in this group doubled this year, and those under 30 are particularly vulnerable. There has been a sharp increase in gay male infection since the end of 2007, while the rate of infection among intravenous drug users and heterosexuals has largely stabilised.
The WHO also reports a Europe-wide rise of 30 per cent in infection rates among gay men between 2003 and 2007. “The resurgence in HIV among men who have sex with men in high income countries is tied to an increase in sexual risk behaviours,” the organisation says, urging that “interventions to control HIV among men who have sex with men should be the cornerstone of HIV prevention strategies”.
Ironically, the increased survivability of HIV made possible by the successful development of anti-retroviral drug treatments appears to have encouraged many young men to take the sort of risks which only four or five years ago their counterparts would have thought twice about. It is crucial that ways are found by the health and education authorities to reach into this group with a safe sex message. But that conversation is not made easier by the extent to which the HIV-infected are still stigmatised and discriminated against, and so a particular onus will continue to fall on the disparate elements of the organised gay community to help educate its own. In 2008 the Government published its HIV and AIDS Education and Prevention Plan 2008 -2012and implementation of it must be properly resourced.
But the news is not all bad. On World Aids Day yesterday the WHO reported that some 33.4 million, more than ever before, are living with HIV, in part a tribute to the success of treatments – the number of Aids-related deaths has declined by more than 10 per cent over the past five years and globally new HIV infections have been reduced by 17 per cent over the past eight years. Since 2001, the number of new infections in sub-Saharan Africa, where two-thirds of sufferers are located, is approximately 15 per cent lower. And yesterday the South African government announced a very welcome U-turn on its previous policy of denial: President Jacob Zuma promised the government would extend the provision of drugs to fight the HIV virus to babies, pregnant women and tuberculosis patients. South Africa, which has the world’s highest rate of HIV, is also starting a “massive campaign” to convince citizens to test for the disease.