THERE HAS been significant under-reporting of cases of HIV infection in the State in recent years, new research has found.
It has established that while 1,770 cases of HIV infection were confirmed between 2003 and 2007 by the National Virus Reference Laboratory (NVRL), almost 15 per cent of these - some 260 cases - were not included in the official HIV figures collated and published regularly by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC).
Dr Cillian de Gascun, a medical registrar at the NVRL, said yesterday the figures demonstrate significant under-reporting of HIV infection in Ireland over the past five years.
He said there was still a voluntary system in place for the notification of HIV infections to the HPSC by doctors around the country but he believed it should be mandatory to address the problem of under-reporting.
"I think there is certainly enough evidence to suggest that the current system is not working as well as it could or should," he said.
Statutory notification was an important first step in the challenge of managing HIV in Ireland, he said.
By the end of June last, some 4,951 diagnoses of HIV had been reported to the HPSC since surveillance began.
Dr de Gascun presented the findings at the winter scientific meeting of the faculty of public health medicine at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.
Meanwhile, the HSE's chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm told the meeting the country was going into difficult times but this "cannot" derail the current health service transformation programme.
Referring to the reforms planned for the acute hospital system, he said changes were already under way in the northeast, in the midwest and in the south and he had recently met physicians in the southeast.
He said it was only when they were presented with the data on the number of attendances for example in AE units every day, the numbers of these that were actually emergencies, and the overtime bill for running some of the AEs that they agree to look at how things can be done differently.
He added that the HSE was "overrun", with people wanting to sign up to primary care teams and he believed over the next five years our primary care team structure will be the envy of the world.
He said that health services would be bankrupt unless they did more health promotion and succeed in getting health promotion messages across.