The Department of Health has launched a £4 million safer sex campaign to increase awareness of the risk of sexually-transmitted infections among 18 to 30 year olds. The campaign, entitled ‘Don’t play the sex lottery - Use a Condom’, started in lifestyle magazines in December, followed by radio and web ads and ‘ambient’ media such as beer mats, scratch cards and washroom posters. A new website - www.playingsafely.co.uk - and helpline - 0800 567 123 - will support the headline messages. The campaign follows the latest figures for HIV in Britain which showed a 25 per cent increase with a record 2,945 diagnoses in 2002 up to September, up from 2,354 for the same period in 2001, bringing the number of people living with the virus in this country to over 41,000.

courtesy: dept. of health

HIV services: ‘The less you have, the less you get’

Gay men living with HIV in Britain are finding that mental health problems are their biggest and most common concerns, according to the latest research.
A new study from Sigma Research, ‘What do you need?’, found that the most common problems experienced by gay men with HIV in the UK are anxiety and depression.
Sigma questioned over 1,800 people with HIV, of whom over 85 per cent were male and just 44 per cent were living in London, and found that the vast majority were gay or bisexual men or black Africans.
Among the gay men, the top needs identified were anxiety and depression (67 per cent), followed by sleep problems (59 per cent), then problems with sex (51 per cent), self-confidence (48 per cent), eating and drinking (42 per cent) and then new skills and retraining problems (39 per cent).
Peter Weatherburn, director of Sigma Research, told the Living Well with HIV Conference in December that the study results were both interesting as well as “crushingly depressing”.

“Mental health problems are the worst and most common for gay men with HIV,” he said, “with practical needs less common and treatment access and information needs even less common.”