Spiked Online, the web descendant of Living Marxism magazine (which didn’t have a great deal to do with Marxism, to be honest, when it was around) publishes some interesting counter-intuitive UK political and health stuff. I just came across this interesting article which points out that,
- “Britain’s HIV/AIDS epidemic remains highly concentrated in London”
- “In the early 1990s, new cases passed 1000 a year, to reach a peak of 1853 in 1994; in 2001 some 558 new cases were recorded.”
- “The total of deaths from AIDS follows a similar course, reaching a peak of 1531 in 1994 and declining to 221 in 2001.”
and most interestingly,
“The big untold story of AIDS in Britain is that the epidemic explosion among heterosexuals that was anticipated in the 1980s has never happened… If we look, for example, at the figures for heterosexually acquired HIV infection in 2001, we find a total of 2226. This has been widely quoted to illustrate the rising tide of heterosexual transmission at a time when spread among gay men is declining…
How many people became HIV positive as a result of heterosexual contact with a partner who became infected in Europe? This figure – the key statistic of the indigenous heterosexual epidemic – is 52 (2.3 percent of the total). It is noteworthy that this number has remained remarkably steady over the past decade.”
That isn’t to say, of course, that the authorities were necessarily wrong to emphasise the risks of unprotected sex to everyone – after all, there are lots of other STDs that need to be curbed, the warnings may have incidentally prevented un-wanted pregnancies and, of course, without the warnings an epidemic just might have occurred. But it is nonethless interesting to see just how far we are in the UK from a real heterosexual AIDS threat.
