What do people in the UK think about HIV / AIDS?

Many people think, because they have been hearing about the AIDS epidemic for so many years, that it's not a problem - they've stopped listening. People seem to assume that the informational campaigns and sex education has worked, and that HIV is only really a danger to high-risk groups of the population, and less of a danger now than in the past.

In its early stages, the epidemic primarily affected gay men, and then injecting drug users and people who had been given infected blood products in hospitals. Injecting drug users, particularly, were assumed to be at risk from HIV. People formed the opinion that these were the sections of the population which were primarily at risk, and that opinion seems to have lasted. More recently, the media has focused on the severe epidemic in Africa, and on HIV positive immigrants entering the UK. Many people seem to think that they're not at risk from HIV - which is why new infections continue to occur.

In fact all sections of the population are at risk from HIV. Amongst drug users, apart from localised explosions which quickly died out, there was no severe epidemic in the UK.
At the moment, gay men remain in the highest risk group for HIV transmission. However, heterosexual transmission of HIV has increased so rapidly that the number of heterosexually acquired infections has overtaken the number acquired by men who have sex with men. Heterosexual infection is now the main route of HIV transmission, although many of the heterosexual infections being diagnosed in the UK are amongst people who may have acquired the virus in another country. Reports show that 57% of people diagnosed with HIV in 2004 were male and 43% were female.

Some areas of London already have infection rates of over 1%.

Many people think there is a cure for AIDS. In 1987, it was reported that a drug called azidothymidine (AZT) slowed down the onset of AIDS. Every now and then, the media reports news of another 'AIDS drug', and many people seem to think that the disease can be successfully treated indefinitely by doctors. In 1999, a survey found that 20% of people thought that there was a 'cure for AIDS'.

In fact it is true that HIV can be successfully kept at bay for many years with anti-retroviral medication, but some strains of HIV are becoming resistant to the medicines used to treat it, meaning that new drug combinations need to be continually developed. Also, in many cases the medication can have very unpleasant side-effects, and some people who have been in treatment for a long time have now stopped taking the medicines, feeling that the side-effects of the drugs have made their quality of life so poor that it isn't worth it.

There is still no 'cure' for AIDS.

Many people think that as we enter the third decade of the UK epidemic, HIV isn't a serious problem in the UK. Contrary to popular belief, the epidemic continues to grow, affecting all sections of the population. Many people now believe that the problem of HIV has been solved in the UK, and that it is only a serious issue for Africa and Asia.

In fact the number of new HIV infections has been rising each year since the early 90s. At the end of 2003, there were an estimated 53,000 adults living with HIV in the UK, of whom 27% did not know they were infected. Of the 21,280 people diagnosed with AIDS in the UK, at least 13,145 had died by the end of March 2005. Since 1999 there have been more than 3,000 new diagnoses of HIV every year, with 6,403 people diagnosed in 2004 (a number that will rise as more reports are received). This is more than double the number of new infections identified in 1999.