UKC receives DfES Matrix AwardThe UKC (UK Coalition of People Living with HIV and Aids) was presented with a ‘Matrix’ award last month for reaching the national quality standard for information and guidance services. Pictured at the awards ceremony (L to R): Millar MacDonald (Department of Education and Skills), Edith Kaggwa, Aidan Keightley, Robin Ramsdale, Paul De’Ath and Roger Black (BBC TV presenter and Silver Medallist for 400 metres at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics). Mr MacDonald congratulated the UKC on receiving the prestigious government award and added: “We think the work you’re doing here is groundbreaking and very important.” |
People with HIV and Aids in the UK face living in poverty and are losing their homes and jobs, says a new report from Crusaid and THT.
The study, entitled ‘Poverty and HIV - Lessons from the Hardship Fund’ reveals that there has been a big drop in average weekly income for people with HIV.
This has led to record numbers of people with the virus applying for assistance from the national Hardship Fund.
Robin Brady, Crusaid chief executive, explained to a meeting at the Houses of Parliament last month that in 2002 the Fund paid out £660,000 in grants to over 3,000 people with HIV, a 47 per cent increase since 2000.
Between 1999 and 2002 the average weekly income of people applying for help fell from £93 to just £65. And so far this year income levels have fallen further to a record low of £57 a week.
“Available benefits come no way near to covering the costs of day-to-day life for people with HIV in Britain,” Mr Brady said, “and the Hardship Fund helps re-establish some quality of life and self-respect.”
Becoming HIV positive can lead to loss of job and housing or even domestic violence as well as increased debt, depression and difficulty in coping, the report found.
Jackie Redding, from THT in the Midlands, said that in the last few years she had seen increasing levels of poverty among people living with HIV. She recounted horror stories of people living rough and even camping out.
“Poverty takes away your pride, your self-esteem and your sense of hope,” she said.
The government’s asylum dispersal policies mean that people are often uprooted at short notice, she explained, and people are often passed backwards and forwards between the Home Office’s National Asylum Support Services and local authority Social Services.
The acute financial problems faced by asylum seekers with HIV in Britain now mean that they make up two-thirds of applicants to the Fund. It now receives over 250 calls for help each week and can give money only for basic necessities.
Crusaid and the THT called for a cross-departmental taskforce to tackle the rising epidemic in this country, including measures to tackle discrimination faced by people with HIV and Aids.
Other recommendations to the government include reviewing the benefits system for people with varying periods of good and bad health as well as better support for HIV positive workers and more effective help from NHS staff.
Robin Brady also called on the HIV sector in Britain to collaborate and co-operate more to lobby for improvements: “The report should prompt us all to think, it should prompt us all to act.”
But Neil Gerrard MP, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Aids, said that pressure on the government to act against asylum seekers could lead to even worse problems for people with HIV.
“Some very nasty decisions will be made by the government in the very near future,” Gerrard predicted ominously.
UKC’s party in HeavenJohn Campbell, UKC’s Founding Patron, pictured at the 10th Anniversary Party in Heaven last month. For a full report and more photos see feature in this issue. |
The proportion of people living with HIV who are diagnosed with advanced HIV disease has declined slightly in recent years, according to researchers from the Health Protection Agency at its first scientific conference in Warwick.
Between 1997 and 2002 one tenth of all people testing HIV positive in England and Wales had an Aids-defining illness at the time of their HIV diagnosis.
Black African heterosexual men have been shown to be twice as likely as other groups to be diagnosed with Aids, or to have a CD4 count below 200, when taking an HIV test.
Ten per cent of gay men were diagnosed with Aids at the time of their HIV test; a similar proportion (11 per cent) of females, yet the Aids rate among heterosexual men was 17 per cent. The fact that higher proportions of gay men and heterosexual women are less likely to be diagnosed in late disease can be attributed to awareness of testing among gay men and the availability of confidential voluntary counselling and testing for pregnant women.
The latest guidelines from the British HIV Association recommend that treatment for HIV infection be offered to anyone with symptoms of HIV infection and before the CD4 count drops below 200 - a level beyond which more problematic symptoms of HIV disease are likely to develop.
Using this marker (CD4 below 200) to define late HIV diagnosis, almost half of all heterosexual men (49 per cent) were diagnosed late. 40 per cent of females and 27 per cent of gay men were also diagnosed at this point, when HIV treatment should already have begun.
Researchers also found that people living outside London were more likely to be diagnosed with advanced disease. Robert Fieldhouse
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Most black African people living with HIV are diagnosed with HIV infection within two years of arriving in the UK, according to research presented at the first scientific conference of the Health Protection Agency last month in Warwick.
740,225 people born in sub-Saharan Africa were resident in England and Wales in 2001.
Almost 9,500 black African people received HIV-related treatment and care in 2002. Two-thirds of all HIV positive black African people are living in London; but the areas with the highest HIV prevalence per 100,000 of the black African population are the Eastern region and the North East (where the HIV rate is just below 50 per 100,000). This is changing however, due to the government’s asylum dispersal programme.
In 2001, 255,520 applications from individuals from Africa were granted permission to remain in the UK for temporary purposes and a further 9,655 applications were granted for permanent settlement.
In the early days of the HIV epidemic in the UK most HIV positive black African people originated from East Africa and there are now around 2,000 HIV positive people from Uganda receiving treatment in the UK.
In recent years greater numbers of individuals from South Eastern Africa have been diagnosed with HIV in the UK. Unsurprisingly a large proportion of these have come here from Zimbabwe. Civil unrest is an important driver of migration and more asylum applications were received from Afghanistan and Iraq in the last few years than any country on the African continent.
The Health Protection Agency also revealed that around 170 people born in the UK think they acquired their infection while in Africa. Robert Fieldhouse
Viacom, the world’s largest media group, has launched an HIV campaign
to promote awareness, fight stigma and foster prevention. Viacom are joining
forces with the US-based Kaiser Family Foundation and the UK’s National
Aids Trust in a multi-million pound ad campaign that will appear on buses,
the London Underground, TV commercials, cinemas, video shops, universities
and colleges around Britain. The ads highlight condoms, mobile phones, computers
and telephone information lines as ‘Weapons of Mass Protection’ in
the war against the virus and feature the Department of Health’s free
and confidential Sexual Health Line 0800 567 123. Visit: