Leaders: HIV figures rise, but new test gives reasons for optimism | Labour call for chips overheated

The facts tell the terrible story. According to the United Nations, in 2011, 1.7 million people died from HIV/AIDS-related causes worldwide.

Across the globe, 2.5 million people became infected with HIV in that year.

Since 2001, the number of people infected in the Middle East and North Africa increased by more than 35 per cent. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, there has also been an increase in new HIV infections in recent years.

Devastating though these figures are, there is also cause for cautious optimism in the fight against this worldwide epidemic. Some 25 countries have seen a 50 per cent or greater drop in new HIV infections since 2001.

Half of all reductions in new HIV infections in the last two years have been among newborn children.

Doctors in America recently revealed they have cured an infant born with HIV for the first time by giving her a cocktail of drugs shortly after birth. Yet for all the progress there has been, 30 years on from when Aids was officially recognised, there is still no sign of a vaccine and, alongside that, the huge problem that more than half of Aids sufferers are unaware that they have the disease.

Which is why the suggestion that self-testing for HIV, using a simple process of taking samples from the gum lining of the mouth without the need for blood testing, could provide a major breakthrough.

Done in the privacy of the home, results are provided within 20 minutes and this method, according to experts at Montreal’s McGill University in Canada, will counter what they see as a societal problem – HIV stigma and perceived discrimination.

The tests needs to be verified medically, the experts warn. However, access to an HIV self-test, linked to proper counselling, will help expand access to screening and reduce judgment and perceived attitudes around HIV testing, the academics suggest.

While it should be stressed this is not a cure for a disease which has claimed the lives of more than 20 million people in the last decade, the approach of making the self-testing kits more widely available as a way of encouraging people to find out if they have the disease is to be welcomed.

In a world which is still struggling to recover from the banking crisis-induced economic downturn and in which politicians appear increasingly powerless and ineffectual, it is easy to look pessimistically on humankind’s lot.

Yet across the globe scientists like those involved in studies like this one are doing great work for their fellow human beings, coming up with ideas which could make the world a healthier, happier place to live.

There is, we should recognise, room for optimism about the human condition.

Labour call for chips overheated

The devil makes work for idle hands, it is said, and nowhere is that better illustrated than in politics. The latest example came in calls yesterday by Labour for compulsory micro-chips to fitted to every dog in Scotland. One would have thought that with a referendum to fight, the “bedroom tax” to oppose, and Ed Miliband to get into Downing Street, the party would have had better things to do.

According to Labour MSP Claire Baker, putting chips into dogs will help reunite the nearly 3,000 stray animals a year with their distraught owners. Furthermore, micro-chip tagging would lead to easier identification of those being cruel to animals, ensure the owners of dangerous dogs are held to account and act as a deterrent to dog theft. Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Those who are cruel to dogs usually do their worst and get rid of the poor animals. Those “caught” can easily deny ownership. And chips are unlikely to deter determined thieves, unless the dogs escape or are recognised by their previous owner. It is all very well for Labour to say the system is being introduced in England, and it is backed by some charities. What matters is what works.

The key problem is not the dogs but the human beings. An example: if, say, an owner of a stray can be located, and is presented with “their” dog, what is to stop them saying they sold it? Nothing. Or are we also to have a vast dog owners registration bureaucracy alongside the micro-chipping? We hope not.

Microchipping works for the dogs of responsible owners. But every puppy born will never be chipped, and the determined irresposible owners will not be brought to book by this.