Rate of HIV transmission among Africans in UK “underestimated”

Africans in Britain are the country's second biggest group, after homosexual men, to be infected with HIV, a conference in London heard last week. Yet research into the specific factors that put Britain's African communities at risk of infection is only now beginning.

Dr Caroline Ndofor-Tah, a sociologist and a coordinator for the African Families HIV/AIDS project with the London Borough of Waltham Forest, contrasted the lack of detailed information about African people's sexual mixing patterns with the “considerable” amount learned about British homosexual men's behaviour.

Studies in the homosexual community had helped to inform policies that had reduced the number of new infections. …