New Strain of HIV?

The Observer and the BBC News web sites are today both carrying the story that a new strain of HIV may have been detected in New York. See the items here and here. Both stories stress that it is far from clear that a new strain has in fact emerged (there is only one case known at the moment). To me, the really worrying thing is that the new strain has been found in a man who "has been having unprotected sex for years". It would seem that the safe sex messages that managed to change our behaviour back in the 1980s are now being increasingly ignored.

Having lost a number of friends to AIDS back in the 1980s, it depresses me that there’s a new generation of people around for whom "safe sex" is a mantra that has lost its power. We should not forget that despite all the advances in anti-retroviral drugs, not one of them will destroy the virus – in combination, they can only serve to hold it in check.