HIV

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2015 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Fowler]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the proportion of people living with HIV who are undiagnosed.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe) (Con)]

My Lords, Public Health England estimates that in 2013 107,800 people were living with HIV in the United Kingdom. Of these, 24%, some 26,100, down from 25% in 2012, were undiagnosed and unaware of their infection. Early diagnosis is important to ensure people can get early treatment and to prevent them infecting others.

[Lord Fowler (Con)]

My Lords, surely we cannot ever eradicate HIV in Britain, which currently is costing the health service something like £650 million a year, when there are at any one time, as my noble friend has just said, 26,000 people who have contracted HIV but are undiagnosed and untested and can obviously spread the infection further. Will my noble friend consider setting up a working party to report on how testing in this country can be improved, which would be of benefit to those people affected and also to the benefit of the public generally?

[Earl Howe]

I will gladly take that suggestion from my noble friend away and give it consideration and I am grateful to him for it. The position on testing is, however, quite encouraging. We have seen more than 1 million HIV tests in sexual health clinics in 2013, which is up 5% from the previous year, and that is only in sexual health clinics. As my noble friend knows, there are other routes to testing through GP surgeries, self-sampling kits and so on. Additional testing is vital if we are going to make sufficient inroads into diagnosing this condition.