the TALE of the testers

women were better off. The test was the last straw for a relationship with a drunken or abusive partner and several of my patients experienced renewed strength and confidence as

single women.”
However, that doesn’t mean that all of the women’s partners were aware of their status. About a quarter of the women have decided not to tell their men - so far. For some, their partners’ ignorance is their bliss.
The best news, perhaps, though, is that when 43 of the 59 women decided to tell their partners of their HIV, only seven partners walked out - 84 per cent stayed. So, on the basis of this admittedly small and unrepresentative sample, girls, if you tell your guy you have HIV, there is only a three-in-20 chance he’ll walk out!
Most of the men decided to test too - 33 out of 40 (three already knew they had HIV).
Only a third of them turned out to be positive too, but the majority of those testing negative (15 out of 21) stood by their women.
Chris and his team asked 11 of the pos/neg (serodiscordant) couples whether they’d adopted safer sex: the answer was that six had and

five hadn’t.
The bottom-line reason for testing positive women, as well as treating them, of course, is to protect their babies; and here the programme was 100 per cent successful. “Antenatal testing really does work, and is crucial,” says Chris. “Out of 56 live births (there were three miscarriages), no babies were born with HIV.” One baby has been born with HIV during the last three years at the North Mid; this was to an untested mother.
This recitation of statistics makes the women’s experience sound easy, however, It wasn’t.
Chris is concerned about current government immigration policy. “The dispersal of asylum seekers has terrible consequences,” he says. “It compounds the difficulty they experience enormously. There’s a direct

conflict between the government policy of testing pregnant women and the fact that we do know that in some cases their seeking treatment has impacted on their ability to stay in the UK, whatever the