Aids figures increase - Personal responsibility is best policy

ANY premature death is tragic. It is doubly so if the death might have been prevented.

That is why the report from Dublin’s St James’s Hospital that recorded the highest number of new HIV cases in a year since records began is worrying.

There has been a 20% increase in positive diagnoses in the last year. St James’s Hospital expects that 242 people will be diagnosed with HIV in the hospital by the end of the year. In 2008, 208 cases were confirmed. The number of cases recorded annually has more than doubled in the last decade.