All people arriving from nations with higher rates of HIV should be tested as part of their visa requirement, MPs have said.
Former public health minister Neil O’Brien MP and practising NHS paediatric consultant Dr Caroline Johnson MP warned migration has impacted the UK’s target to eliminate HIV in the UK by 2030.
The Tory MPs said: “Numbers of newly diagnosed patients had fallen consistently since 2005. However, data for 2022 and now recently published data for 2023 show that progress has been thrown into reverse:
“This is driven by a growth in numbers of newly diagnosed individuals who were born outside the UK and Europe – particularly among people from Africa. Within Africa the largest growth has come from people from East Africa, followed by southern Africa.”
Australia requires an HIV test to meet the Health Requirement for a permanent visa.
Meanwhile New Zealand requires HIV testing as a requirement for visa applicants intending to stay for more than 12 months.
The share of new HIV diagnoses to people born outside the UK has gone up across the country over the last two years.
But this is particularly true outside London. Last year it was 91% in Yorkshire, and 88% in the East Midlands and East of England.
The majority of those living with HIV in Great Britain (57%) are people born outside the UK.
In a joint post online, Mr O’Brien and Dr Johnson said: “International migration is not evenly distributed around the country. The regional statistics above don’t necessarily fully express the load that this changing demographic mix is putting on HIV services in some places.
“Because of the rapid growth in the number of HIV cases among people born outside the UK, many of the places that have seen the largest increases in the total number of new HIV diagnoses are outside London.
“While the capital still sees the largest total number of new diagnoses every year, the proportional increase is higher in every other region – and the absolute increase over the last two years is higher in the East Midlands and South East.”
In 2023, there were 6,512 HIV diagnoses in the UK excluding Northern Ireland, a 46% rise from 2022.
At least 6,008 people were diagnosed with HIV in England in 2023.
For the first time, over half of all HIV diagnoses were made among those previously diagnosed abroad, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) found.
HIV – which stands for Human immunodeficiency virus – damages the cells in the immune system and weakens the body’s ability to fight everyday infections and disease.
The virus is spread through the bodily fluids — such as semen, vaginal and anal fluids, blood and breast milk — of an infected person. However, it cannot be spread through sweat, saliva or urine.
