There were 250 new cases of TB in Leicestershire last year and local health authority officials are predicting that the number this year could be even higher. Last year a large outbreak in the East London borough of Newham was among recent arrivals from Africa, many of whom were also diagnosed with advanced HIV. It is National TB Day on 24th March.
Activists in Glasgow are fighting against Home Office moves to deport nine adult HIV positive African asylum seekers and 15 children. Legal challenges are being made under the Human Rights Act to overturn the decision. Two women in the group facing expulsion claim that they were raped and tortured in Africa. Body Positive Strathclyde's Gary Kelly said: "The British government will have blood on its hands if it sends these women home to die."
Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has called on the international pharmaceutical companies to make cheap anti-HIV drugs available to poor countries. Interviewed in The Guardian newspaper last month, Brown called on the drug companies to recognise their responsibilities to help millions of people dying from Aids. Opposition at the World Trade Organisation has so far blocked demands from developing countries that they be allowed to import cheap generic versions of drugs and override patents on drugs for infectious diseases in 'emergency' situations.
From 2004 patients are due to receive copies of all letters between doctors working in the NHS as a matter of course. But new research from the British Medical Journal found that in 76 new patients, 56 letters were copied to patients in unaltered form, three were not sent at all and 17 doctors made omissions, citing potential distress to patients and possible breaches of confidentiality.
Strathclyde police are investigating claims that doctors knowingly gave patients contaminated blood in the 1970s and 1980s leading to 500 haemophiliacs north of the border contracting hepatitis C. Now the Scottish Haemophilia Groups Forum is alleging that vital information from patients medical records has gone missing. The news follows the dismissal, by Scottish health minister Malcolm Chisholm last month, of a compensation claim for the haemophiliacs.
The Department of Health has announced that the number of screening centres for chlamydia is to be doubled. Health minister Lord Hunt said that 10 new centres would open by the end of the year after research found that as many as one in 11 women across the country are suffering from the disease. The first sites will target young women between 16 and 24, who are at greatest risk of infection. Chlamydia rates in the UK have gone up 122 per cent in the last 10 years and women can face sterility if it is not treated in the early stages of infection.
Latest server statistics for our website show that that the magazine is widely read on the web across the world. Nearly two million requests for pages have been made at the site over the last year, an average of nearly 6,000 a day. Over 46,000 different computers - the best guide to total readership - now regularly visit the Positive Nation web pages, a number similar to our hard copy readership. Requests for web pages include 600,000 visits from companies, over 300,000 from individuals in the UK and, surprisingly, over 2,000 from the US government and 1,385 from the US military!
