HIV Testing Week

Debate between Kevin McKenna and Florence Eshalomi

Thursday 13th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Kevin McKenna (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Dr Allin-Khan, to serve under your chairmanship.

I say a massive thank you to the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) for securing this debate. I thank everyone involved in the all-party parliamentary group on HIV, AIDs and sexual health, and every organisation that has already been mentioned today, from the Terrence Higgins Trust to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Actually, I also thank all those small, everyday champions: people who are positive; people who have been allies of people who are positive; everyone who has worked in the bioscience sector; and everyone who has worked in the health sector. This has been a collective effort, involving thousands and thousands of people in this country, to get us to a point where we are potentially only a few years away from eradicating all new transmissions of HIV.

As the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale said in opening this debate, we are also in LGBT+ History Month. In the LGBT community we are used having a lot of clashes, such as Pride happening at the same time as Wimbledon and Glastonbury; we are just used to it.

This debate has put me in a very reflective mood, as did being elected to Parliament and moving from nursing into this world. I was 11 when I realised I was gay; that was in 1985. It was just as everything was hotting up around the AIDS pandemic. It was a pretty scary world to step into. By the time I was properly coming out in the early 1990s, I met lots and lots of friends, including friends and lovers who had AIDS or HIV. I spent a lot of time going to hospitals, and it was there that I realised nursing would be something that suited me. So, it was partly in response to the AIDS epidemic that I was driven along the career path that I was. I also remember the abject terror of getting early HIV tests, particularly before I became a student nurse; a positive test could have stopped that career dead in its tracks at that point.

I will not comment on the age of everyone in this room, but I think like many people in this room I have lived right the way through this pandemic. Of course, by the time I was finally diagnosed with HIV it had changed again, but that was still 20 years on. So I have lived for a long time as an HIV-positive man. There was a time in my life when friends were taking tablets that did have quite severe side effects, some of which were actually very unpleasant and led to them still suffering from HIV and then AIDS. Now, it has whittled down to one tablet a day, and as I get into my 50s it sits alongside my statins and my arthritis medication—all the other medications that we all have at a certain point in our lives. That is the difference.

[Florence Eshalomi]

I commend my hon. Friend so much for his passionate speech and his lived experience. Earlier this week I attended another event, and the Elton John AIDS Foundation was there. Richard Pyle, one of its directors, mentioned how great it would be if in a few years we could have an injectable form of PrEP. Does my hon. Friend think that that is the advancement we need to see to help address HIV/AIDS?

[Kevin McKenna]

We already have injectable forms of HIV medication, particularly for people with chaotic lifestyles. They only need to take a jab once every couple of months. It is a real way forward, which will further help us eradicate this.

I have also been reflecting on, in my nursing career, those patients I have nursed for who did not know that they were positive, who became incredibly sick. They developed AIDS without knowing they were positive, coming straight into an intensive care unit and waking up to find out that they were positive. It was a massive disruption to them and their families, and it was stigma that was driving that. People do not have to live that way; people do not have to suffer that way.

A very strong message today is: everyone, just get tested. Everyone, do it. It is absolutely fine; it is just a little scratch on the finger. There should be no stigma. You will not pass this disease on when you are treated, you will not actually suffer and, honestly, it is boring and mundane. In the community of gay men, it has been very boring and mundane for quite some time. In wider communities, just catch up with the rest of us, frankly. If everyone is tested, we will get there.

The one thing I would say to Ministers is that opt-out testing has been extremely successful. There are diseases out there such as hepatitis C that can be completely eradicated. People do not have to be on a tablet for their whole lives; the course is just a few weeks. If we can identity those people through opt-out testing, we can tackle several diseases with one effort and eliminate those as well. I would like to hear that from the Minister.