Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, on how many death certificates HIV has been mentioned in each year since 1985.

Public Health England and its predecessors have monitored the United Kingdom’s human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic since the early 1980s.

The following table summarises the number newly diagnosed with HIV, the number of deaths occurring among people with HIV, the number of people accessing HIV care (i.e. diagnosed prevalent HIV infections) in the UK from 1985-2012, and the number of death certificates that specifically mention ‘HIV’, ‘Human Immunodeficiency Virus’, ‘AIDS’ or ‘Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome’.

* Numbers of people accessing HIV care in the UK before 2000 were estimated.

Notes:

1. As not all people infected with HIV die of the condition this is not necessarily recorded on death certificates, it is also known that there was under reporting on death certificates in the early years of the epidemic.
2. New cases of HIV diagnoses are reported centrally from clinicians and laboratories.
3. Death reports are collated from clinicians and supplemented with reports from the Office for National Statistics. Deaths include HIV and non-HIV related mortality.
4. Patients diagnosed with HIV are seen for care and treatment at a network of free accessible HIV outpatient services. Access to, and retention in, HIV is extremely high; consequently these data correspond to diagnosed prevalence. The number of patients newly diagnosed and the number of deaths each year will not directly correspond to diagnosed prevalence; this is due to migration patterns and a small subset of patients (<3%) who do not attend care after diagnosis.