Lord Fowler credit: Ian Nicholson/PA Wire
Twenty five years ago when I was Health Secretary the Government mounted a high profile campaign warning of the dangers of HIV and AIDS. At that time AIDS was a death sentence and public education was one of the few weapons we had. Over the last quarter of a century much has changed. In particular, new drugs have been developed which, provided the disease is detected early enough, enable the patient to live a long life.
But although much has changed, much remains the same . That is why in September the Lords Select Committee on HIV and Aids in the UK published its report “No Vaccine, No Cure”. The report will be debated in the Lords this Thursday, which is World Aids Day. The report identified that HIV and AIDS is one of Britain’s major public health challenges of the 21st century.
By next year there will be over 100,000 people living with HIV. The cost of treatment and care is now approaching £1 billion a year. Worst of all, about a quarter of those who are infected live in ignorance of their condition, harming not only their own lives but also infecting others.
We should be under no illusion – the new drugs preserve life but they have not eliminated the difficulties of living with HIV. The evidence we took in our inquiry painted a picture of patients with medical and mental health problems; with a sense of isolation; and too often facing discrimination and stigma. They can face ostracism in their communities and job discrimination when their condition is known.
The tragedy is that we are dealing with an entirely preventable disease. That is why the Committee called for a new priority to be given to prevention policies. That would be good for the public and good also for health service costs. The life time treatment costs for a patient with HIV is about £300,000.
What we now need is a major new effort on testing to reduce the number who are unaware of their condition; a new public education campaign to increase knowledge of the disease, and tackle the prejudice which still continues; a new effort to tell young people the facts about HIV; a continuation of the clean needle exchange programme for injecting drug users – which has been an outstanding success – and special efforts in for example prisons where the incidence of HIV is well above average.
Since our report the Government has rejected our call for a new wide ranging public information campaign about the dangers of HIV and AIDS and how it can be prevented, preferring to concentrate on information for high risk groups. They should reconsider. There is now a whole generation who have never been the focus of a public information campaign about HIV and AIDS and that should change. The debate on Thursday, taking place as efforts to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS will be happening right across the globe will give us the chance to make that point directly to the Government.
HIV and AIDS can be prevented and the words of the 1986 campaign are still true today. The more partners, the greater the risk. Protect yourself. Use a condom.
Ignorance lies in contracting it in the first place.
Unless, of course, it is given to you by polluted blood sold to the NHS. Or, some other infection of this nature.
Don’t have unprotected sex is the sane answer to this dilemma. Difficult, yes. But nowhere near as difficult as trying to stay alive once having it.
Wasn’t one of the MP’s spouses found to have been selling contaminated blood to the NHS. Making a fortune as he did. Whatever happened to him? Isn’t he back in bed with the wife who left in protest.
How many died as a result of his business deals with US prison companies who sold it to him whilst knowing full well it was likely to be lethal?
The swinging sixties came and went, and with it immunity to many diseases which had become curable, if not cured.
The old disease is unmentionable but the resistance to healing of it, is not.
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Doctor’s notes:
1 Patient has left white blood cells at another hospital.
2 Examination of the patient revealed that he was circus sized.
3 I saw your patient today who is still under your car for physical therapy. Is this a question for making amends?
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If the British establishment would only themselves read, learn and inwardly-digest such repressed modern advances in individual-human-development knowledge and know-how as:
“Wisdom of the Body Moving” (Hartley)
“L.E.T”- containing Method III (Gordon)(or download and print-out its five essential
steps from http://www.lifefresh.co.uk);
“Six Thinking Hats” (de Bono)
“How To Win Every Argument” (Pirie)
“Awareness Through Movement (Feldenkrais);
“Natural Vision Improvement” (Goodricj);
and join-in with some of the easier programmes on channel 275 “Body-in-Balance”
then enough of the greater population would follow-suit, and whilst the prevailing incursion of serious Diseases into our Human Race still has to be fought by Medical Science, the still-greater masses of human populations would be greater-strengthening both their self-healthing abilities and their immune-systems.
It needs a concerted effort between the various, and too-often ‘competitively-mutual-harming’ Training and Education systems, all around the World; don’t you think ?
We live in a biosphere that has observed an historical quarantine entirely because populations and migrations were so small. Has HIV been around for more that 100,000 years and is there a correlation between the quality of human sexual morality and the prevalence of HIV? In Africa the quarantine was maintained up until recently allowing a benign sexual promiscuity to be practical. Now this ancient evil has been imported into their biosphere and becomes their version of the Black Death.
Ref: Black Death and AIDS: CCR5-Δ32 in Genetics and History
http://qjmed.oxfordjournals.org/content/99/8/497.long
I checked some simple figures to see if they are right, (simple figures shock and are nearly always wrong) and it would appear that there are 120,000 people in the UK suffering from a reduction of immunity to disease, which improved immeasurably post WW2 with antibiotic research and use, known as HIV.
The syndrome ( a set of problems, not a disease)AIDS, Acquired Immunity to Disease Syndrome, takes so many forms that, like the huge variety of body cancers, needs to be defined more carefully.
Somebody might have TB acquired late in life,
through reduced immunity, but it is still classed as AIDS.
Not everybody does have reduced immunity but the taking of anti-biotics for anything and everything, early in life, is a sure recipe for having it.
The question of whether the diseases are more powerful, or the resistance of the individual less, is surely still on the agenda.
New anti-biotics are regularly engineered.
Close sexual contact is a sure way of catching any one of a number of sexually transmitted diseases.
Fascinating article Senex. Thank you for the link.
Those scientists who believe that the Black Death was Y. pestis
I do so, but that its pathology was different each time, and in each place due to different living conditions.
<p< Considering Africa as a single zone, as is presently the case with CCR5 studies, constitutes a blunt instrument (as crude, if not more so, as considering Europe as a single homogenous genetic entity)
A good deal more so, since we know so much less about the disease history in Africa.
Furthermore the current collection of statistics in Africa may still be highly contentious, in the perceived causes of death, and underlying HIV/AIDS.
The one certain way of not catching it was by seclusion, which was one of the reasons that accounted for the rise of the monasteries.
If there was no contact whatsoever with the outside world, without strict quarantine, they were totally immune. The same difference would not apply to AIDS, except in
idiorhythymic(?) monastic orders where the monks slept and ate in close contact with each other, which was the case in those days, but not so much today.
I am not convinced that there is any real value in taking historical parallels and cooking it up with modern genetic science, but an interesting read.
Thanks Gareth. There is an HIV story that is not being told, that of the HIV ‘Immortals’. These are individuals, survivors that live their entire life with HIV even going on to develop AIDS but still managing to cling on to life with the help of drugs. The problem for them is that they do not realise they are an ‘Immortal’.
I use the word ‘Immortal’ because such individuals especially in the gay community enter loving relationships with an HIV infected partner only to see the partner develops AIDS, whither away and die. They pick themselves up and enter a new relationship and the same thing happens again and again. After a while this takes its toll and more and more they ask themselves “Why not me, why didn’t I die instead”.
They start drinking heavily, smoking, anything that will hasten their own demise. Their immortality ends when they develop a fatal liver or lung disease. HIV drugs being developed are for people who do not possess the allele.
The moral dilemma is if you knew you were an ‘Immortal’ would you enter a loving relationship in the first place. How can anybody live their life without a loving relationship; more to the point should the NHS test for the allele and tell the patient they have it?
One way of making sure HIV Aids doesn’t spread at the rate it is, is to screen all immigrants from countries which are known to have this disease as an epidemic. If you are not willing to do that, then look forward to the levels here akin to those countries they come from.
Another way to stop its spread would be to have those who pass it on, knowing they are infected, jailed for manslaughter or bodily harm. They do this in Europe, so why not here?
Follow that up with tackling those who buy blood from groups they know are likely to be dealing in contaminated supplies. Such as US prison authorities who sell it to unscrupulous individuals who then make money passing it on to our NHS at a profit. Anyone caught in this business from top to bottom should be imprisoned.
And add to that, the removal of any assets or funds they amass to apply to monies, not yet paid out, to those who have sadly been infected by this horrific practice.
Those who are suffering the most, and who have won compensation are still waiting to receive their payment. Which is disgraceful.
Yet, governments pay out the tax payers money to those ‘outside’ our country, in the shape of indiscriminate foreign aid, again leaving our own people to suffer as a result. This is a ludicrous way to run a country. Businesses who worked on this basis would be bankrupt in a trice. No wonder we face that same penalty.
How can anybody live their life without a loving relationship;
The muses are a great help! Music, literature and so on, although ‘terpsichore'(dance) would not be much good for a life of solitude, unless you are a whirling dervish!
No but seriously, those who enter the loving relationship with God as eremitic monks or nuns, certainly do so, except to God
A cenobitic monk would certainly not have that capacity, his or her loving relationships probably being with other members of his order, through God.
The Desert fathers, St Antony, being the patron saint and founder of monasticism, a Hermit.
Living in the world, among people, it would be almost impossible.
To the hermit, life itself of any sort, would be cherished; the passing of the seasons; the warmth of the day; the cold of the night.
Many things! An ant, a bee….. vegetation, including his own lunch!
But a man with no such religious inclinations would find it quite impossible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV
After giving my previous post some thought,the reply to Senex’s “immortals”, I decided that he had led me down something of a blind alley, quite apart from using this term immortal, surely to be reserved for Gods and not men?
Then my leading on to an explanation of monasticism does less than justice to monks
and the syndrome in question.
I therefore checked the Wikipedia link to be
quite sure of my facts, and sure enough my understanding differs largely from the first explanation above of AIDS.
AIDS is not a disease in itself ; it is a set of any number of problems, which may themselves be ,yes, diseases.
The explanation above of HIV may well be entirely accurate, that we know more about
lentiviruses and retroviruses than we did, especially in the context of the weakening powers of anti-biotics to the big diseases , say of the 1930s, the old unmentionable, Tuberculosis, gonnorhea, that HIV has been designated as what produces the weakening effect on those 1950s-1980s wonder drugs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentivirus
That is the morphology and explanation of Genome replication and organization. That is the science.
THE EFFECT is that people now die of the diseases that they always used to die of because the drugs are no longer effective.
HIV/AID syndrome it may be, but they die of the original diseases, sexually transmitted as they may well be.
How are their deaths reported in Death certificates? Are they reported as HIV/AIDS
or are they reported as TB, Gonnorhea, liver Cancer,intestinal cancer, and so on ,and so forth?
To mention “immortals” is to beg the question of good and resilient health, even if a blood test has revealed such a lenti-virus, or retro-virus,in the said individual.
Knowing the casual approach to death certificates a certificate of death due to TB, would probably now be attributed to the disease we are discussing, certainly in the UK.
Given the childhood resistance developed by many to TB, then in the UK two partners (presumably Gay) where one stayed living, and the other kept dying, would merely have natural resistance to TB from childhood.
The other might have acquired it from BCG tests in adolescence, and not be as effective.
Questions of consistent sexual, ie anatomical, misuse between successive partners would also arise.
Immortal? Huh?! ……. Huh.
Death certificates ……. AID syndrome.
Gareth my use of the word immortal was in inverted commas and not to be taken literally. One thing you may not be aware of is the existence of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus or SIV.
Ashlee’s blog, linked below, has some excellent research that is in plainly spoken. Similarly the CBC News article discusses the history of SIV in a similar manner.
There seems to be far too much emphasis on the technical side of SIV and HIV rather than on a discovery process leading to why these viruses exist in the first place. It seems rather odd that SIV should be present in so many monkey populations without it doing them any harm.
One might conclude that the virus is present to prevent predation and like most defence mechanisms it deters or kills. Both Chimpanzee and Humans have been killing and eating monkeys for a very long time and its conceivable that the virus has been jumping species for just as long.
One of the ways we could try and contain the disease is to make it illegal to kill monkeys or chimpanzees, but just how you would do this with human population pressures as they are is another matter. Just how this would be researched is equally as difficult but not impossible. When simian predation by humans stops, might we see a similar decline in HIV too?
Ref: HIV Precursor in Monkeys Ancient: Study
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2010/09/16/hiv-monkeys-siv-age.html
Ashlee: SIV to HIV: Monkeying Around with an Epidemic
http://seriousmonkeybusiness.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/siv-to-hiv-monkeying-around-with-an-epidemic/