If you put HIV AIDS statistics UK into Google, it returns a list of about 173,000 web pages - over three pages for each of the 50,000 or so people living with HIV/AIDS in the UK. How is anyone to make sense of all this information? The aim of this article is to provide a brief guide to statistics on HIV and AIDS in the UK and worldwide.

Starting in the UK, the main source of reliable and up-to-date information on the HIV/AIDS epidemic is an official body known as the Health Protection Agency, HPA for short. The HPA collates and publishes huge amounts of data on many aspects of public health, including environmental hazards such as chemical pollution and radiation, but much of its work is concerned with infectious diseases such as HIV and AIDS. To find out more visit the main web site for HPA information on HIV and AIDS.

This provides links to their major annual report on HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, as well as to more frequently published sources of information. The latest annual report, published in late 2003, describes the state of the epidemic in the UK at the end of 2002. This report provided headline data:

• The number of diagnosed HIV infections in UK adults was 34,300, which was 20% higher than the previous year.
• There were over 5,500 newly diagnosed cases of HIV in 2002, nearly double the number of new cases in 1998.
• Nearly one third of the people with HIV in the UK, an estimated 15,200 people in all, have not had their infection diagnosed, and thus do not know that they have the disease.
• The number of undiagnosed HIV infections is increasing rapidly (up 19% on the previous year.)
• However, numbers of new AIDS diagnoses and AIDS deaths are not rising in the UK, and indeed have fallen hugely since the mid-1990s, because of the availability of reasonably effective antiretroviral treatments.

  This and other HPA publications provide more detail as well:

  • Of people with diagnosed HIV infections in the UK nearly 2½ times as many are male as female.
  • Of the men with diagnosed HIV infection, about two thirds acquired the virus from sex with men, and about a quarter from sex with women.
  • Of the women with HIV, 85% got the virus from sex with men.
  • But in recent years, of new HIV diagnoses, over twice as many were from sex between men and women, and these infections were mostly acquired in Africa.
  • Two thirds of the heterosexually acquired HIV infections first diagnosed in 2002 were in women.

  The position in Scotland is rather different from that in the rest of the UK. About one quarter of people infected with HIV in Scotland originally got the virus from injecting drug use (compared to only about 3% in the rest of the UK), though the number of new infections from injecting drug use has become very small in recent years in Scotland too.

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