will mean treating more opportunistic infections. It will cost more money and is also a major public health issue,” Dr Johnson added.
Lisa Power, head of policy and campaigns at THT, said when she was at this autumn’s Labour Party Conference in Blackpool, she discovered to her horror that local prevention services, like needle exchange and condoms, had been withdrawn to pay for the high cost of anti-HIV drugs bill.
Neil Gerrard, MP for Walthamstow and chair of the APPGA, said that MPs in the group would now be putting down questions to ministers in the House of Commons about these funding problems.

Dr Margaret Johnson

Manchester ‘not ready to tackle sexual health’

The three Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) covering North, South and Central Manchester have still not worked out a strategy on sexual health or even agreed on which of the three are going to take responsibility for the area.
The admission, seven months after the PCTs were set up, will reinforce concerns that sexual health is not being prioritised as an issue under the new NHS structure.
Evelyn Asante-Mensah, chair of Central Manchester PCT, told the Sexual Health 2002 Conference in Leeds on 1 November: “The challenge of Shifting the Balance of Power is one, I think, which we’re not quite ready to take on.” (Shifting the Balance of Power is the Department of Health document

that laid out the new PCT structure).
“If we don’t get the process and structural issues right, we’ll have increased difficulty in