meeting the aims of the government sexual health strategy,” she said.
North Manchester has agreed to take the lead on HIV services, and central Manchester on family planning, she added, but sexual health and GUM services remain “a grey area...Central Manchester still does not have an HIV or sexual Health lead officer.”
Asante-Mensah continued: “We also house an increasing number of dispersed asylum seekers, whose health needs we don’t know. We are overstretched, over-measured and under-resourced.”
“We are still working out how to commission sexual health services from the non statutory sector...we may need to disinvest in some services that are not working so well,” she added.
Central Manchester is the largest of the three Manchester PCTs, with a population of 175,000, one-third of them from black and ethnic minorities, and a budget of £179 million.
It saw a 16 per cent increase in HIV cases in 2001 compared with an 11 per cent increase nationally, as well as an outbreak of syphilis in gay men. Gus Cairns

HIV in the UK - what’s going on?

Last year there were 4,700 new HIV infections in Britain and nearly 500 deaths from Aids, according to Dr Barry Evans of the UK Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre.
“Deaths are still continuing despite highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART),” Dr Evans told the autumn BHIVA conference.
The estimated total of people known to be living with HIV up to 2001 has risen to 27,000 - 16 per cent up on the year 2000. Two-thirds of these people are on treatments, with 80 per cent of those on triple combination therapy.
HIV transmissions between men who have sex with men in Britain have continued at between 1,400 and 1,600 a year since the late 1980s.

Dr Evans said: “There has been very little change in new cases of HIV among gay men throughout the late 1990s. An increase in risk-taking has offset the benefits of HAART on