Free HIV tests that can be done at home are being offered this week to people in England.

It is part of a government drive to improve diagnosis, which dropped off during the Covid pandemic.

The kit is small enough to fit through the letterbox and arrives in plain packaging through the post.

It gives a result within 15 minutes by testing a drop of blood from a finger prick. A “reactive” result means HIV is possible and a clinic check is needed.

Support and help is available to arrange this.

If the result is negative it means the test did not detect HIV. If you think you are at risk of HIV, however, you should test every three months because it can take a while for the virus to show in the blood.

About 4,400 people in England are living with undiagnosed HIV, which comes with serious health risks.

HIV medication can keep the virus at undetectable levels, meaning you cannot pass HIV on and your health is protected.

Most people get the virus from someone who is unaware they have it, according to the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) charity which campaigns about and provides services relating to HIV and sexual health.

HIV testing rates remain a fifth lower than before the Covid-19 pandemic – with heterosexual men in particular now testing far less than in 2019.

Testing among gay and bisexual men has increased but rates of testing among women have fallen by 22% compared to 2019, while there has been a 41% drop for heterosexual men.

Straight men and women are also far more likely to be diagnosed at a late stage.

THT has been working with the BBC drama EastEnders to raise awareness of HIV among heterosexuals through a storyline where a lead character called Zack Hudson is diagnosed with the virus.

Taku Mukiwa, head of health programmes at THT, said: “Gay and bisexual men and black African people continue to be the most impacted by HIV in the UK, but anyone who’s sexually active can be affected and should think about testing.

“As the EastEnders HIV storyline we’ve been advising on shows, the truth is it’s always better to know your HIV status, whether positive or negative.

“If it’s negative, you can make sure it stays that way.

“While, as Zack in EastEnders is learning, huge advances in HIV treatment mean you can live a long healthy life with the virus, have children who are HIV-negative and that HIV can’t be passed on to anyone else.”

People can live with HIV for a long time without any symptoms. Testing is the only way to know your HIV status.

Using a condom during sex can prevent infections.

Dr Alison Brown, interim head of HIV surveillance at the UK Health Security Agency, said: “HIV does not discriminate, no matter your gender or sexual orientation.

“Taking up a free and confidential HIV test regularly when having condom-less sex will ensure you’re diagnosed early and started on effective treatment, helping to reduce transmission of HIV and the number of people with undiagnosed HIV.”

It is recommended that anyone who is sexually active tests for HIV annually, and more regularly if you have a new or multiple partners.

The free testing initiative coincides with National HIV Testing Week and making progress towards the government’s goal of ending new HIV cases by 2030.

World Opinions – BBC Health

L’article HIV testing: Free DIY home kit offered in England est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

As the Sex Pistols said back in 1977, the year of the silver jubilee, never mind the bollocks. It really doesn’t matter what it’s for – just seize the moment: an extra bank holiday for this miserable country, which has the fewest national holidays in Europe and the second fewest in the world. England and Wales have just eight, Northern Ireland 10, Scotland 11; by contrast Europe averages 12.8, and Japan has 17.

Enjoy a release from England’s grindstone working culture, whipped on by cabinet luminaries Liz Truss, Priti Patel, Kwasi Kwarteng and Dominic Raab, who in 2012 damned British workers as “the worst idlers in the world” in their obnoxious book Britannia Unchained.

So knees up, and let everyone roister in their own way, as I shall with family and friends. But expect relatively few streets bedecked with bunting and flags: only 14% of people are planning royal celebrations. Camera crews hunt for examples of extreme royalism bursting out all over, yet 54% of those asked told pollsters they were not interested at all. The reality may, of course, prove different: celebrations are infectious, and I suspect plenty of us good republicans will be watching these pageants, troopings, concerts and spectaculars with a drink or two.

As we celebrate this one long life, there is no doubting public admiration and affection for the Queen herself. She remains a fixed emblem of pomp, even as national dignity is trashed by the present prime minister. She has steered her wayward family “firm” skilfully through 70 years of change and tumult. Like it or not, reigns are milestones in all our lives. This will be one of her last hurrahs, and I defy anyone not to measure out their personal and our national history in some hazy notion of an Elizabethan age.

Republic, the anti-monarchist pressure group, has been sending poster vans around the country emblazoned with Make Elizabeth the Last. And that’s the point: not revolution but an end to the monarchy when the Queen dies. That is the time to think deeply about what monarchy does to us and to the British constitution – before the Vivat rex! rings out to seal the country’s monarchical fate, allowing no time for reflection.

Whatever our vision of the future, there is no doubting public admiration and affection for the Queen herself

Ahead, we look destined for three old or ageing kings: Charles, William and George, all likely to accede in their 60s or 70s in this long-lived line. Is there never to be a pause for thought? Boris Johnson has shown how easily a rogue prime minister abuses an unwritten constitution, with an unelected and symbolic head of state obedient only to that prime minister. Elected presidents, as in Ireland’s distinguished choices, have a formal role as guarantors of constitutions. A Labour party constantly challenged to prove its patriotism will never turn republican until the public gets there first. We need a constitutional convention to reform our political system’s deformities, above all electoral, but also its warping by the monarchy.

Today, enjoy the pomp and spectacle, but remember the infantilising influence on Britain’s political psyche of babies born to rule. “Modernise” it as much as her heir may try, the whole fandango of inheritance helps keep this country unequal and socially immobile, weighed down by the power of birth privilege.

Any republicans in festive mood will find it hard to dodge what Johnny Rotten called the bollocks. Just when you think no more unctuous religio-royalism can flow from the mouths of serious broadcasters high on royal miasma, another stream of brainless adoration pours out. Much as I admire the BBC, and will defend it to the last against culture war bombardments from Boris Johnson and Nadine Dorries, I fear this jubilee coverage smacks of a panicked loss of the BBC’s sense of itself. All that we ask for is a modicum of detached reporting about this choreographed promotion: monarchy is not outside politics.

Graham Smith of Republic has been monitoring coverage. “The BBC website has more than 200 stories about the jubilee, and only one mentions republican opposition,” he says. Republicans are a small but significant minority, with 27% now in favour of abolishing the monarchy. Smith describes “a slow puncture” of support for the crown, which now stands at 60% – quite a drop from 70-75% a decade ago. The young expect it to be gone within 25 years.

Beyond the statistics are the personal recollections. I watched the Queen’s coronation in Pall Mall in 1953, yearning for a toy golden coach. In 1977, I panicked at losing my small daughter in the dark at a village jubilee bonfire. At Charles and Diana’s wedding fireworks, we got scarily crushed in the Hyde Park crowds. On Friday I’ll be with family at the ancient, once-every-20-years Pole Fair in Corby, Northamptonshire.

National celebrations make for shared memories. But don’t let the culture warriors turn monarchy into a test of patriotism. Passionate patriotism comes from a thousand different reasons to love the place where you belong. Britain’s proudest achievements – from Shakespeare to the NHS, the BBC to the Beatles, Edward Jenner’s vaccinations to the steam engine, the television and Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web – have nothing to do with heredity. National history will always be fluidly reinterpreted through changing prisms. Each revision is invariably castigated as “woke”, but that history is dead if it is set in concrete memorials, as the culture warriors wish it to be.

Everyone will make their own jubilee kaleidoscope of the Elizabethan era, according to age, temperament and politics, because this Queen stretches back to her wartime uniform and We’ll Meet Again. There she is, through every national rising up and sliding down, that permanent background image to all the best and worst memories of what Britain has done to itself in 70 years.

By Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

L’article For today, even republicans like me can put up with the pomp with a drink in hand est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

English water companies have got used to pumping raw sewage into the sea and rivers. An investigation launched last year by the regulator, Ofwat, and the Environment Agency, is a chance to put things right. But there are worrying signs that this opportunity to shine a light is in danger of being missed. The refusal by the Environment Agency to reveal which 2,000 sewage treatment works in England are being looked at, and whether this will lead to delays in dealing with new complaints, raises questions about its commitment to openness.

That the investigation is happening at all is due to huge efforts by campaigners. Concern over sewage dumps has been rising in response to water companies’ failure to tackle a longstanding problem that increased extreme weather, due to climate change, is expected to make worse. Discharges of untreated waste into the sea or rivers are supposed to happen only in exceptional circumstances, to reduce flood risk. Over recent years, it has become clear that rules are being routinely flouted by an industry that puts profits before environmental stewardship.

At the same time, the Environment Agency’s record for punishing breaches has sharply declined following budget cuts. A report from a committee of MPs last week drew attention to the poor condition of rivers and called for a step change.Advertisementhttps://f7b27d2f24cb416fc4248e3b708cf108.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Last summer, Southern Water was fined a record £90m for pouring between 16bn and 21bn litres of raw sewage into protected coastal waters for financial gain. It was the worst environmental crime in the Environment Agency’s 25-year history. Yet the House of Commons last year stopped short of imposing a legal duty on water companies to stop releasing raw sewage, after ministers rejected a Lords amendment.

The nine privatised water companies, which are regional monopolies, are instead obliged to make only “progressive reductions” in the amount they pollute. Now the approach of the Environment Agency to requests for information from the campaign group Fish Legal suggests an unwillingness to hold the industry publicly to account.

Not every company has the same repulsive track record as Southern Water. But the problem is systemic and cannot be blamed on one weak or unscrupulous board of directors. Over 11 years, £16.9bn has been awarded to water company shareholders in dividends, while debt has rocketed to £48bn. Bosses are rewarded for failure: Liv Garfield, chief executive of Severn Trent, was awarded £1.9m in bonuses in 2020, a year when the company poured untreated waste into waterways on nearly 61,000 occasions.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Scottish Water is publicly owned, charges less, and since 2002 has invested nearly 35% more, per household, than privatised English water companies in the infrastructure upgrades that are needed to limit pollution. Welsh Water is also non-profit. The English industry’s dismal track record makes renationalisation the obvious answer. In the short term, the bodies with responsibility for regulating water must toughen up. A five-year plan from Ofwat, expected soon, must put much stronger emphasis on environmental protection. And when the public seek information about which water companies are failing, they must be given it.

The Guardian view 

L’article View on water pollution: come clean on sewage est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.

Since emerging earlier this year with his self-produced debut single, the skittering, jazz-flecked Imaginary Friends, 23-year-old rapper-singer Wesley Joseph has written, directed and scored his own short film, Pandomony, as well as directing the video for his undulating second single, Martyrs.

While he delegated the animated visuals for July’s glitchy Ghostin’ to Pixar’s former technical director Najeeb Tarazi, the video’s fusion of the hyperreal and the mundane marries purposefully with the intention of his music. “When you look back at life, the romanticised memories are… more poignant than the reality,” he told TheFace. “But music allows you to relive those moments as over-exaggerated, melodramatic soundbites. And I want to provide those soundbites.”

Born in Birmingham and raised in Walsall, where he was a member of the OG Horse collective alongside Jorja Smith, Joseph moved to London in 2016 to study film. He also started making beats on his laptop, converting his bedroom into a makeshift studio. That ad hoc, DIY ethos permeates everything he does, with the lyrics to Ghostin’ written quickly on the bus home from a session with the song’s producer, electronic pioneer Joy Orbison. He’s also working closely with Jai Paul associate Lexxx, who mixed his appropriately titled new single Thrilla. A heady fusion of bass-rupturing beats, warm organ and Joseph’s playful, André 3000-esque rapid-fire flow, it ends with a question: “Why don’t you call me?”. They probably assumed you’d be too busy, to be honest.

Thrilla is released on 16 Oct

By Michael Cragg – theguardian.com

L’article Music. One to watch: Wesley Joseph.. Video est apparu en premier sur زوايا ميادين | Mayadin Columns.