Thursday, April 02, 2015

Farage's Claims about HIV in the UK

Labout leader Ed Miliband called out UKIP leader Nigel Farage here on a hiv claim


The claim is reported here as
Nigel Farage has lashed out at NHS treatment for foreign HIV patients – branding them “health tourists”. The UK Independence Party leader made the claims in ITV’s leadership debate this evening. He said: “Here’s a fact, and I’m sure other people will be mortified that I dare to talk about it. “There are 7000 diagnoses in this country every year for people who are HIV positive, but 60 percent of them are not for British nationals.

To break this down "In 2012, there were 6,360 new diagnoses of HIV". "There were 6,000 people (4,480 men and 1,520 women) newly diagnosed with HIV in the UK in 2013". The 7000 figure sounds high. Lets see what data is produced to back this up.

"60 percent of them are not for British nationals."
Thanks to Roma in the comments who pointed out 'new diagnoses reported among people born in the UK ... to 46% (2,220/4,980))' from the 2014 report. This is not a nationality figure. But it is pretty close to one. Some born in the UK won't be British Nationals and a fair few born abroad will be. A graph from here shows




Implying from ethnicity to nationality does not really work I think. But it does make the 60% claim look like it needs more evidence. The figure for Asians and Black Caribbean's is about 500 or under 10%.
Another vaguely nationality source of data I can find is from HIV in the United Kingdom: 2013 Report Appendix 1 total men+women African born 11,100+20,700 out of 98,400 which is about a third of HIV carries in the UK seem to be African born heterosexuals. Again with the assumption that all African born people are not British nationals.

To me these claims, of 7000 new cases and 60% of them not British Nationals, look dubious but I am open to evidence correcting me.

2 comments:

  1. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/401662/2014_PHE_HIV_annual_report_draft_Final_07-01-2015.pdf

    This is where he got his figures from i think. Page 9: 46% of newly diagnosed were born in the UK out of the total of 6000.

    Obviously this still isn't a great indicator of nationality, and definitely says nothing about EU / Non EU: majority of the cases are with people born in Africa - how will leaving EU help?

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  2. Anonymous7:51 AM

    Raw data from PHE: table 5 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/361273/Country_and_PHE_region_v3.xls

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