LATEST FIGURES showing an increase in the number of people diagnosed with HIV highlight the need to step up efforts to raise awareness of how the infection is spread and to implement a national sexual health strategy, according to campaigners.
Labour has called on the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, to reduce the Vat on condoms to 5 per cent, the minimum rate allowed under EU law. In the 2008 Finance Bill, it was cut to 13.5 per cent from 21, but in Spain the Vat is just 5 per cent.
Labour spokeswoman Joan Burton said Mr Cowen had admitted that the rate could be cut to 5 per cent, and dismissed his argument that such a move "would have major structural implications for the Vat system". Ms Burton said: "I find it difficult to believe such a minor, yet important, change could cause such havoc."
She said there was an urgent need for measures to reduce the number of people having unprotected sex.
In response, Mr Cowen said the Vat "only plays a small part in determining the price of such products" but added that he hoped the reduction would lead to lower prices and that retailers would "look at their own pricing structures".
Mary O'Shea of the Dublin Aids Alliance (DAA) believes price is a significant issue. "When you compare it to Spain where the rate is 5 per cent, it is still very high here," she said.
The latest figures from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre relate to the first half of 2007 and show that there were 204 newly diagnosed HIV infections reported in that period, compared with 183 in the same period in 2006.
Of the 204 newly diagnosed cases in the first half of 2007, the route of transmission was known in 150 cases and 79 - more than half - were acquired through heterosexual sex. Just under 23 per cent of cases were in injecting drug users and 20.7 per cent were in homosexual men.
The recent figures also show that a total of 941 cases of Aids were reported up to the end of June 2007 and that 402 of these people had died. However, the HPSC cautions that data on Aids needs to be interpreted with caution "due to under-reporting and late reporting".
Trends over recent years show the number of HIV diagnoses peaked at 400 in 2003, fell in 2004 and 2005 and then began to increase again. Much of this increase is within the heterosexual population.
Dr Paul McKeown of the Health Protection Surveillance Centre said that, since 1999, the number of new cases among drug users and homosexual men has remained almost steady. In recent years about half of all new cases were acquired through heterosexual contact.
He said that after an initially high level of fear about Aids in the 1980s, people's attitudes seemed to change once they saw that infection rates were not "sky-rocketing" in western countries as they were in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr McKeown said the increase shown in the figures for the first half of 2007 was very significant and needed to be addressed.
"We can see from the increase in sexually transmitted diseases generally that people are not taking the precautions they should be taking," he said.
He also pointed out that it was largely a young person's disease - the average age of HIV diagnosis for males is 34.5 years and for women, 30.6 years.
"People in their 20s feel that it will never happen to them. And getting people to change their behaviour is difficult, especially when it involves something pleasurable - it's the same with alcohol and tobacco," Dr McKeown added.
Ms O'Shea agreed that it was difficult to change behaviours but said sexual health was not getting enough priority. She said that "harm reduction" initiatives with drug users - like needle exchanges - proved effective.
She said similar measures were needed to tackle transmission among heterosexuals and that a national sexual health strategy, modelled on the National Drugs Strategy, was needed to provide such initiatives.
Education initiatives tended to be "haphazard" with one-off lectures rather than being integrated into the curriculum. DAA is calling for the Relationships and Sexuality Education component of Social, Personal and Health Education programme to be continued into senior cycle.
"Many people born in the 1980s don't seem to know about Aids - there needs to be more education," she said.
Ms O'Shea said the implementation of the primary healthcare strategy was also crucial as this had promised that people would be able to access a range of tests at their local GP or health clinic.
"People need easy access to testing services. The dedicated STI clinics we do have are overstretched and people don't want to go and wait in a waiting room like that," she said.
Early detection is vital both to reduce the chances of the infection being spread and to allow treatment begin. Once a person is diagnosed HIV positive all medication is free. Ms O'Shea pointed out that treatments had greatly improved. She said, however, that there is still a stigma attached to HIV and that people are prevented from getting mortgages and travelling to a number of countries.