HIV and behaviour - research in the UK
Around a third of the people infected with HIV in the UK have not been diagnosed and are unaware of its infection, according to a report on the UK’s sexual health from the Health Protection Agency (HPA).
Scientists at the MRC Health Services Research Collaboration in Bristol, and the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge, together with the HPA, developed the methods for analysing the data, which revealed that an estimated 73,000 adults are now living with HIV in the UK.
Dr Daniela De Angelis, at the Biostatistics Unit, said: “The development of statistical methods to combine different types of evidence to estimate unknown quantities such as the number of undiagnosed HIV infections, for which there are no direct data, is crucial for public health.”
The MRC work is a culmination of many years of research on social and behavioural factors affecting HIV, which has influenced healthcare policy regarding testing and awareness campaigns. “The advantage of our methods is that they allow surveillance experts to detect conflict between different sources of evidence. Crucially, they also provide policy makers with a measure of uncertainty in the estimates”, said Dr De Angelis.
The report, called ‘Testing Times’, published on 23 November, showed that nearly 8,000 people were newly diagnosed with HIV in the UK in 2006. Two-fifths of these probably acquired their infection in the UK, of whom approximately two-thirds were gay men.
Among all newly diagnosed people in 2006, 60 per cent were heterosexuals, most of whom were infected abroad. Among the 750 diagnoses thought to be due to heterosexual HIV transmission within the UK, many were in black ethnic minority communities. This figure has been steadily increasing from 500 in 2003.
- ‘Testing Times’ (see www.hpa.org.uk/)
- See also ‘HIV and behaviour – A story of discovery’
