As World AIDS Day looms, experts have warned that ignorance is to blame for the three-fold increase in HIV cases.
Lily is a 21-year-old student in London. She has a long-term boyfriend and hopes to have children when she finishes university. She is HIV positive. âFor a while, I thought my life had ended,â she says.
âI was horrified by what was to become of me. I believed I was just handed a death sentence.â
However, Lily is far from alone. The National Aids Trust (NAT) says the number of people living with HIV in Britain has trebled in the past ten years.
It estimates there are more than 90,000 people living with the virus â more than enough to fill the new Olympic stadium â and it predicts that figure will reach 100,000 next year.
Deborah Jack, NAT chief executive, says HIV is more prevalent in London than any other part of the country, with one in 200 people living with the virus. On a busy Tube journey, there may be two or three people who are HIV positive on the train with you.
According to Allan Anderson, of the sexual health charity Positively UK, greater ignorance is to blame for the rise. âAwareness is poor because HIV and Aids have dropped off the radar,â he says.
âThere were lots of awareness campaigns in the 1980s but now polls suggest young people in the UK donât know about HIV and Aids. A new campaign is needed.â
Anderson suggests the reason for the lack of national campaigns is the cost of producing them. âThere are relatively few people living with HIV compared to conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, so they tend to get higher priority,â he says.
âIt is also hard to establish what sort of campaign might be effective and who it would be best to target.â
NATâs concern has prompted the organisation to launch a website. HIVaware.org.uk provides up-to-date information on the disease and draws expertise from Durex â NATâs partner in the project.
The launch comes as a study commissioned by NAT and carried out by market research experts Ipsos MORI reveals a worrying decline in the understanding of HIV over the past ten years.
The key findings are that many people are unaware of how the virus is transmitted (20 per cent do not know HIV can be passed between a man and woman by having sex without a condom, and one in ten incorrectly believe HIV can be transmitted through kissing).
People also do not always know how to protect themselves (only 30 per cent can correctly identify all the ways HIV can and cannot be passed on).
âPeople should be giving more thought to HIV,â says Jack. âMany people think HIV has gone away, or they think it only affects African communities or gay men. They donât think it affects them.â
NATâs figures show 90 per cent of Londonâs primary care trusts and 20 per cent of Englandâs are considered to have a high rate of HIV.
Outside London, the highest prevalence is in Brighton and Hove, where seven in every 1,000 people are HIV positive. In Manchester, the figure is about five per 1,000.
In 2010, there were 6,658 new HIV diagnoses in Britain. Of those infected, 54 per cent were probably exposed through heterosexual contact. Lily was one of them. HIV is a serious problem and one that is not improving.
Not only is a large proportion of the population ignorant about HIV, NAT estimates about 26 per cent of HIV-positive Britons are not aware that they have the virus. They could be unknowingly infecting more people.
The groups most affected are still gay and bisexual men, and black African heterosexuals; NAT estimates that about one in ten men who have sex with men in London are HIV positive. This compares with nearly one in 20 in Britain as a whole.
The Department of Health is working closely with the Terrence Higgins Trust and the African Health Policy Network on national, targeted HIV prevention programmes.
However, people such as Lily, who do not fit into these high-risk groups, are missing out on vital education. So NAT will be asking people on World Aids Day to âAct Awareâ, find out more about HIV and use that information to protect themselves.