The Spectator

Spectator letters: Why Aids is still a threat, elephants are altruistic, and crime has gone online

Aids is still deadly

Sir: Dr Pemberton (‘Life after Aids’, 19 April) subscribes to the now prevalent view that we have turned the corner on Aids. Well only up to a point, Lord Copper.

There are now about 100,000 HIV carriers in the UK, and in London, where Dr Pemberton works, as in the rest of the UK, reports of new diagnoses of HIV infection are continuing at much the same rate as before. These diagnoses are too often of individuals who have been infected for years, and are liable to have passed HIV on to others. It is also estimated that as many as one fifth of all HIV-infected individuals in the UK remain undiagnosed.

Dr Pemberton is right to say that anti-retroviral treatment has greatly extended survival with HIV infection. It is, however, too early to state that life expectancy of someone with HIV is now similar to that of someone without the virus. That outcome depends on prompt suppression of viral replication by early treatment, an opportunity only available to those who have had their infection diagnosed swiftly. This requires more frequent and regular HIV testing of those at continued high risk of infection than happens at present. Sustained treatment will also render HIV carriers sexually non-infectious; however it is not necessarily easy to persuade apparently fit people, or indeed their clinicians, of the advantage of embarking straightaway on a lifetime’s daily treatment, given its possible side effects.

It is no time to be complacent about HIV/Aids, either from a clinical or a public health perspective.
Dr Philip Mortimer, retired virologist
South Northamptonshire

Bad biology

Sir: I was mildly amused by Theo Hobson’s article ‘Atheism’s empty tomb’ (19 April), but for the wrong reasons. While I wish to pick no quarrel with his theology, his biology was strewn with schoolboy errors.

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