Jane Takes a HIV Lead
posted: 16/03/2011
The discovery of HIV in 1981 sparked widespread panic and a media frenzy. But 30 years on, one of London’s leading London HIV doctors, Professor Jane Anderson, knows that keeping HIV in the public eye is now much harder.
Jane is the director of Homerton Hospital’s Centre for Sexual Health and HIV – she happens to be married to TV wit Clive Anderson – has watched the HIV changes over the years.
New Chair for BHIVA
She takes over as Chair of the British HIV Association this spring.
“I qualified as a doctor just at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic,” she said. “We didn’t know about HIV. We just knew about the [gay] men who were dying. When I first started, we were giving people huge quantities of drugs to take home – like shoe boxes full of the most revolting potions. If you told me then that we would have one pill to be taken once a day in the course of my career – not even my lifetime – I would have said absolutely not.”
She began working at the Homerton in 1990 after setting up the HIV unit at Barts hospital in London.
The Homerton had just 35 HIV positive patients back then. Now the Homerton hospital HIV team care for 820 people. Survival rates have hugely improved with the development of combination treatment of antiretroviral drugs in the mid 1990s, which has transformed HIV into a lifelong, but manageable, condition. People can have a good and long life now with HIV.
Treatment success
Patients aged 35 when infected can expect a further 35 years of normal life, and the team at the Homerton ensure the babies women with HIV may have are HIV-negative.
Stigma still a testing barrier
But despite the medical advances, one barrier still remains. “There’s a frustration with the stigma and the fact that people are still reluctant to get tested,” said Jane. “It is one of those things –you know that you have got the solution in your hands but people are too afraid to come and take it. To have come this far and to still find people won’t talk about it – this is where medicine meets reality.”
Undiagnosed means treated late
The number of people living with HIV nationally reached an estimated 86,500 in 2009. But more than a quarter – almost 22,500 – were still unaware of their infection, according to the Health Protection Agency. In many HIV clinics around one quarter of all HIV diagnoses are at a late stage of infection, when permanent damage has already been done to the immune system. Most deaths from HIV in the UK are among the people who were late coming for medical help.
The Homerton hospital has some celebrity supporters - actor and comedian Stephen Fry, who filmed part of a HIV documentary at the hospital, as well as Jane’s husband, the former barrister and television presenter Clive Anderson, who are not afraid to take a public stand.
Jane and Clive met in 1979 and will be celebrating their 30th anniversary this year.
“He is incredibly supportive. He has always been up for helping,” said Jane. “I’m always coming along with another request and he always says yes.”
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