How Arsenal exposed a PSG weakness – while revealing one of their own
The demand from Mikel Arteta is now obvious, but the manner Arsenal get there is not. He said his team need “something special” after this 1-0 home defeat to Paris Saint-Germain in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final. There was then the same caveat as after Real Madrid. “It’s only half-time.” Luis Enrique went further, insisting this tie “has only started”.
That should make it even less of a surprise that both managers described this as a game “of different phases”.
There are duly a few ways to look at it, beyond the fact PSG have yet another lead against an English side. The night could have been so much worse for Arsenal, as they had a few issues exposed. They similarly know they can be better. Arsenal showed there are weaknesses to be exploited in the French side, but also so many strengths to try and stop.
It was notable that Arteta made such a point of saying Arsenal solved one “very specific” issue from the first 20 minutes with how his team moved the ball. That may still mean the tie ends up being decided by two very different individual moments at either end of this first leg.
There was obviously Ousmane Dembele’s superb goal after just three minutes; that remains the difference. There was then PSG’s flurry of late chances, and particularly Goncalo Ramos’s strike off the bar. It maybe says much about the night that Arsenal anxiously watched some of those efforts go astray, in the hope that a 1-0 defeat still gives them a significant chance in Paris. That could be fateful. Arteta may well lean on that.
In between, there was how performances ebbed and flowed. PSG had significant periods when they looked like the best team in Europe, and a level above.
There were then long stretches where Arsenal rallied, with Enrique admitting that Arteta’s team occasionally “dominated”. The timing of Merino’s disallowed goal probably didn’t help. Just as Arsenal were building an emotional momentum after half-time, it was suppressed by both the decision and the long wait. There was never the same heave.
Perhaps this is where Arteta’s absences really had an effect in Europe. That’s where the margins start to matter. It was like, with the absences they had, Arsenal had to figure out how to restructure their team on going behind.
Thomas Partey’s suspension, in particular, was to prove crucial in that one key moment. There was also the thinness of Arsenal’s attack. They were no longer just missing their main forward in Kai Havertz but also had such a shallow and young bench.
It was maybe no coincidence that Luis Enrique’s side had the better of the late chances, after a game that had become quite tactical. Arsenal had to try and force the opening, and did enjoy a lot of space on PSG’s left side. The problem was how many warnings they had on stepping out.
This might not be about how it finishes, though. It might be about how it started, which is evidently such a lesson with PSG.
You can prepare and think you have covered every angle, only for Enrique or one of those attackers to come up with a move you hadn’t imagined. In this case, it was the manner in which Dembele took up space in the false nine. Arsenal initially didn’t know how to deal with it, and it definitely didn’t help that was specifically where they were missing Partey’s energy.
Rice felt he had to help double-up on the electric Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, who of course created space and rolled the ball across for Dembele. The forward obliged and sent the ball into David Raya’s far corner.
It was the worst possible start, near the beginning of a 20-minute spell of extended excellence. This is what people are talking about when they enthuse about PSG as the best team in Europe. It is these sensational spells, when they combine an astonishing intensity with electric attack. That approach currently feels unique, and why an Enrique team is so different to Pep Guardiola’s.
There’s the speed of the transition, and then there’s the speed of the feet. Kvaratskhelia and Dembele can bring teams to areas they don’t want to go. It’s even more dispiriting for the opposition because, if they don’t get you by swarming your own box, they can easily get you when you’re trying to swarm theirs. As Arsenal repeatedly had to be on guard, you can be patiently building an attack only to find yourself relying on a desperate challenge near your own goal seconds later.
There is another side to that, too, though. It is impossible to indefinitely sustain. Arsenal also stopped Joao Neves playing those passes through, which may have been that “specific” issue Arteta was referring to. PSG consequently ebbed, and there is a residual vulnerability when you go at them.
That is especially the case on their right. Achraf Hakimi leaves such space behind, and Marquinhos can struggle to cover it. Most of Arsenal’s best moments – and certainly their best chances – came from there. Arteta might well insist they could have had three, even if that would have been a charitable scoreline given the general pattern of play.
Neves had to intercept superbly when the area seemed to open up for Merino, before Gianluigi Donnarumma then stopped superbly from similar breaks. In the first half, he turned Gabriel Martinelli’s effort away. In the second, it was Leandro Trossard’s. The latter was especially impressive given the power of the effort.
But that was kind of it. Unable to really bring much more quality in attack on, other than the teenage Ethan Nwaneri, the game kind of flattened out into this tense occasion.
Even PSG didn’t get forward in the same way until they made subs. There was a general sense of playing it out for the second leg.
Arsenal know they need to do so much more, though. This wasn’t the epic night that Arteta demanded. It was something altogether odder. At the least, they know everything comes down to Wednesday in Paris. It’s going to be about how they finish, having seen how PSG started.
Zelensky aide reveals key sanction Putin hates the most
Russia could strike Nato with nuclear weapons, a key Putin ally warned, as he hit out at Sweden and Finland joining the bloc.
Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian prime minister and security council deputy, said the two Scandinavian countries have “automatically become targets for our armed forces.”
Mr Medvedev is an anti-Western hawk and has made repeated nuclear threats since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“They are part of a bloc hostile to us which means they automatically became a target for our armed forces, including retaliatory strikes and even the nuclear component or preventive measures,” he said.
It comes after a major Russian drone attack on Ukraine killed a 12-year-old child this morning and wounded three others just hours after Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a fresh 72-hour ceasefire next weekend.
The girl was killed after one of 100 drones fired by Russia overnight hit a residential building in Samarivskyi district in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine’s emergency service said.
Shortly before the attack, Volodymyr Zelensky accused Mr Putin of “another attempt at manipulation” with his latest offer of a temporary ceasefire in Ukraine.
Bride facing eye removal has sight saved in time for wedding
A doctor facing the difficult prospect of eye removal had her sight miraculously restored just in time for her wedding, thanks to a pioneering genomics lab.
Dr Ellie Irwin had battled a debilitating and mysterious eye infection for five years, with experts unable to pinpoint the cause. The ordeal left her contemplating a drastic solution: having her eye removed.
However, a cutting-edge metagenomics team at Great Ormond Street Hospital (Gosh) intervened, utilising a novel genetic test that acts as a genomic dragnet. This innovative approach allowed them to identify the root of Dr Irwin’s persistent eye problems: a rare bacterial infection.
Following a targeted course of antibiotics, her symptoms began to recede, and her vision remarkably returned, allowing her to see clearly on her wedding day earlier this year.
The 29-year-old doctor, from Bristol, said: “I will never be able to thank the teams that continued to fight to find answers for me enough.
“Metagenomics has truly been game-changing for me.
“I spent Boxing Day of 2023 in hospital, thinking about whether it was time to have my eye removed.
“Now I can’t even imagine being back in that place, I am able to get back to focusing on my life – being able to have that for my wedding day is a priceless gift.”
Dr Irwin started to have problems in her right eye in 2019 when she was a medical student.
She was initially diagnosed with a condition which causes inflammation in the eye and despite treatment her symptoms worsened.
A horde of tests looking for infections had come back negative.
“I had really just reached my breaking point; my team had tried every test to find a cause and the intensive treatments and multiple appointments were severely impacting my life,” Dr Irwin said.
“I had got to the point that I began to discuss with my team my wish to have the affected eye removed.”
Her doctors at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London reached out to the metagenomics team at Gosh.
A sample from her eye revealed Dr Irwin had a very specific strain of leptospirosis, a bacterial infection, in her eye.
“When they told me they had found a treatable infection it really changed my life,” she said.
Dr Irwin was given a three-week course of antibiotics and in March was able to celebrate her wedding infection-free.
The metagenomics team uses a sequencing technique which identifies bacteria and other types of infections and viruses from patient samples.
The test is “untargeted”, meaning that it can look for all types of infections, rather than a test for a single infection.
Currently the service is used as a final option when medics have already exhausted all alternatives to identify a suspected infection.
The service currently analyses six samples a week from patients around the country.
Judith Breuer, professor of virology at University College London (UCL) and honorary consultant virologist at Gosh, said: “We have been developing our metagenomics service at Gosh and UCL for over 10 years now and we are incredibly proud to be the first UK accredited service.
“We are now able to offer this vital genomic testing to patients around the country, and it is amazing to see the impact it is already having for patients like Ellie.”
Carlos Pavesio, consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, said: “We are delighted that this new service enabled us to identify Ellie’s infection and treat it.
“As a result of this, we were able to address the source of her recurrent inflammation.
“We are excited about the opportunities this opens up and have already initiated a clinical trial on the use of metagenomics for hard-to-diagnose eye infections.”
Disgruntled user has left the chat: Is it time to hang up on WhatsApp?
A friend of mine doesn’t use WhatsApp. I still remember the day I found out – principally because I was utterly flummoxed by the revelation.
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “How am I supposed to contact you?”
“Er… by text message?” she countered.
“But what if it’s an event and I’m inviting lots of people?”
“Just invite me separately.”
“But what if there’s a group chat I need to add you to?”
“You probably don’t need to.”
“But what if I need to do a poll??” (I was clutching at straws now.)
“I dunno, just send me the options?”
“But what if…” I trailed off. To be, honest, I had already run out of questions; the perceived stumbling blocks were actually pretty limited. Still, I could not get my head around this outlandishly contrary lifestyle choice. Now, there are signs that more of us could be joining her. Having inveigled its way into the very fabric of our digital social lives, making itself seemingly “indispensable” in the process, WhatsApp perhaps thought it had earned carte blanche to do as it pleased. But the latest feature to be insidiously introduced by the Meta-owned app – a new AI button, quietly added to British users’ screens in recent weeks – is testing even its most ardent advocates.
The digital chatbot is like Meta’s version of an integrated ChatGPT. You can engage it in back-and-forth conversation and ask it questions by clicking on the omnipresent new blue-indigo-violet circle; there’s also an AI search bar at the top, previously used to search for keywords in messages, where you can “ask Meta AI” for information. The function cannot be turned off or disabled – you simply have to take it or leave it. As in, leave WhatsApp and relinquish the app altogether. For all that Meta has called it “optional”, there is no real option C. You can choose not to use the AI, sure, but you cannot get rid of it.
I’ll ask the obvious question: why include such a tool in an app whose primary purpose is to facilitate personal messaging between friends and family? I open up WhatsApp to connect with real people, not to strike up a chat with a large language model. It’s hard to fathom why it’s there at all, other than to jump on the bandwagon of our culture’s current dystopian obsession with all things AI. I’m reminded of the sudden proliferation of “protein” food and drink, an easy marketing sell that’s been hijacked by brands as a means to flog products by tapping into the latest health fad. I can already imagine the Meta label: “new and improved WhatsApp – featuring your recommended daily allowance of AI!”
Numerous users have bemoaned the functionality – or lack thereof – of Meta’s latest tool. But there’s a much darker side to all this than simply an AI bot that gets things wrong occasionally or is a watered-down, buggy version of better alternatives.
While the end-to-end encryption ensuring the privacy of your personal messages – one of the biggest attractions of using WhatsApp – remains unaffected, there are still concerns outside of that. Meta itself tells users to only share material with its chatbot that they’re happy being used by others. “Don’t share information, including sensitive topics, about others or yourself that you don’t want the AI to retain and use,” it says.
There’s also a troubling message regarding the fact that anything you do share with Meta AI – plus “general information, such as your region” – can be passed on to the organisation’s partners. The reasoning for this is “so that you can get better results”, whatever that means. In reality, Meta can share all of your AI messages, plus other information about who you are, to a range of companies that include Google and Microsoft. And once those guys have your data, they have their own completely separate set of privacy policies dictating what they can do with it.
Even more concerningly, an investigation found that the AI feature could be prompted to offer sexual role-play scenarios to young people. WhatsApp users over the age of 13 get automatic access to the chatbot, which has sexual role-play capabilities and can be used to engage in conversations and enact scenarios with sexualised characters such as “submissive schoolgirl”, according to The Wall Street Journal. An internal memo from several Meta developers noted that: “There are multiple … examples where, within a few prompts, the AI will violate its rules and produce inappropriate content even if you tell the AI you are 13.”
Meta responded to the WSJ report: “The use case of this product in the way described is so manufactured that it’s not just fringe, it’s hypothetical. Nevertheless, we’ve now taken additional measures to help ensure other individuals who want to spend hours manipulating our products into extreme use cases will have an even more difficult time of it.”
But even if you strip out all of the more potentially nefarious elements, there’s still a case for uninstalling that pervasive green icon from our smartphone screens. With easier communication has come, arguably, too much of it: according to one study analysing 111 participants’ WhatsApp use, each person sent an average of 38 messages per day and received a whopping 107. When my friend told me why she’d opted out of the world’s most popular messaging app – which has a frankly terrifying estimated 2.78 billion users – it wasn’t out of privacy fears or a personal grudge against Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg. She just found it “annoying”. All those groups. All those unnecessary messages. The constant distraction from the ping, ping, ping of ceaseless notifications. Her life, she said, was better without it.
As someone whose ever-increasing smartphone addiction seems to have gone hand in hand with WhatsApp’s ascendancy – and as a woman who has been a member of far too many passive-aggressive hen do group chats to have come out unscathed – I think I’m starting to believe her. Maybe it’s finally time for disgruntled users to “leave the chat”, once and for all. Maybe it’s finally time to hang up on WhatsApp.
Spain and Portugal race to identify cause of outage as power finally restored
Authorities in Spain and Portugal are trying to find the cause of a mass electrical blackout across Spain, Portugal, and parts of France after the power is restored for tens of millions of people.
Spain’s High Court will investigate whether a cyberattack may have caused one of Europe’s most severe blackouts which plunged the Iberian peninsula into darkness.
Power has now returned to households in Spain and neighbouring Portugal, with the after-effects still being felt.
Investigators are still looking into the cause of the blackout, which remains unclear, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez as he vowed to not let this “ever happen again”.
The investigation comes despite Spain’s grid operator REE all but ruling out a cyberattack in its preliminary assessment of the outage, which prompted travel chaos and left many without water, Wi-Fi or mobile network for hours.
Travel chaos continued into its second day with large bustling crowds still in Madrid’s train station even as power returned.
Around 500 flights were cancelled in total due to the blackout, according to an estimate by The Independent’s travel correspondent Simon Calder.
How online schools can help children form friendships as they learn
When thinking about the best education for your child, it’s naturally not just academic success that comes to mind. A good quality school experience is made up of many parts and one key element is the socialising opportunities that school can provide. Socialisation is crucial for building social skills, growing emotional intelligence and helping children form their own individual identity, as well as giving them an additional incentive to attend a place where they have fun and feel part of a community.
While it might be assumed that the social options are reduced when children attend online school, this is not the case. In fact, there are a number of advantages in terms of the structures, support and diverse social opportunities offered to children who join online schools.
Online schools give students the opportunity to form connections with a much more diverse community of students. The online model allows schools to welcome young people from around the world and this gives pupils a chance to make friends with students from differing backgrounds and cultures. Furthermore, this means they can meet more like-minded individuals and form stronger bonds and more meaningful friendships. This access to such a big and vibrant community also ensures that students can really find ‘their people’ and avoids situations where students are stuck in small circles or forced to engage with classmates that don’t share the same interests or passions.
This is something that Grace, who is now in year 13, has experienced since moving to online school. At her previous school, she was struggling with socialisation and felt that she didn’t really have a self-identity. At an online school, she has found she can be more herself. “A lot of people think that online school is about being alone, but I’ve found that without the physical element, I can express myself better,” Grace explains. Subsequently, the majority of her closest friends are from her online school and many she has met offline too. “I feel like I’ve met my people,” she says.
Isabella, who is in year 10, has also found that her experience of socialising at an online school has suited her much more than previous bricks and mortar schools. With her father’s job meaning the family moves country every three years, she has always previously struggled forming new friendships at the schools she joins. “I’m always the ‘new’ student, and it’s tough,” she says. After experiences with bullying, she found that online school is an environment she can thrive in. “You don’t have to turn on your camera or use your microphones if you’re not feeling comfortable. I’m not really a ‘social’ person, but I have made some friends here because we have these breakout rooms where we can talk to each other,” she adds.
While young people might not be meeting their fellow students physically every day, online schools put in place extensive measures to ensure that socialising is available for those who want to. This can be seen clearly at King’s InterHigh, the UK’s leading global online school which welcomes children aged 7 to 19 from across the world. Here, students join a warm and welcoming community with a huge range of opportunities for socialising. There’s dozens of clubs and societies for students across all year groups, representing a vast range of interests from chess to technology, sculpture to debate. Throughout the yearly student calendar, there are a number of events, showcases, and competitions of all kinds that provide a chance to socialise in different settings. Some happen internally, like the King’s InterHigh Arts Festival, while others allow students to interact with peers from outside their school when attending events like the International Robotics Competition.
Assemblies bring students together on a weekly basis and give them the chance to celebrate each other’s achievements, hear from their Student Council representatives, and find out what’s coming up at school. Each student is also assigned to one of the school’s eight houses and these smaller, tight-knit communities bring students a sense of belonging and camaraderie. Additionally, inter-house competitions are a fun and friendly way for students to engage and bond.
Although much socialising can come as a result of activities organised by the school, students at King’s InterHigh who are aged over 13 can continue building these relationships in a more informal setting thanks to the in-house, monitored, social media platform. Restricted solely to school students, the platform is safe, secure, and monitored to ensure a positive socialising environment for all those who choose to use it.
Online schools don’t just offer opportunities to socialise online but also offer ample opportunities to cement these connections in offline settings. At King’s InterHigh, there are global meet-ups throughout the year which bring together families allowing both children and parents and guardians to connect in real life. Regular educational school trips, from Geography excursions to science practical exams at other Inspired schools (the group of premium schools of which King’s InterHigh is part of) also allow children to socialise and have fun together in different settings.
Meanwhile, the annual summer camps, themed around a variety of interests and passions, including adventure sports, fashion, football, and tennis, are open to students across all Inspired schools and are held at spectacular Inspired campuses worldwide. Furthermore, the Inspired Global Exchange Programme offers a range of school exchange opportunities, lasting from one week to a full academic year.
Choosing where to educate your children is a big decision for any parent or guardian that involves many factors. However, when it comes to the social benefits, for the right child, online schools offer something truly transformative. To find out more about King’s InterHigh and whether it might be the right learning choice for your family, visit King’s InterHigh
India and Pakistan: The nuclear standoff that we should worry about
Tourism is Indian-controlled Kashmir’s lifeline, but after 26 innocent Hindu visitors on holiday were gunned down by terrorists in Pahalgam, one of its beautiful locations, panic-stricken visitors have emptied out of its majestic mountains, lush valleys and mesmeric lakes.
A military move by India against Pakistan – both armed with nuclear arsenals – to avenge the deaths is now the only focus in the subcontinent. The exchange of two-way gunfire across a United Nations-mandated line of control – a de facto border in the disputed territory claimed by both India and Pakistan since 1947 – has been unrelenting for six successive nights.
Pakistani defence minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, remarked to Reuters, “We have reinforced our forces because it [a military incursion by India] is something which is imminent now.”
Narendra Modi, a Hindu hardliner and head of a coalition regime in India, where 80 per cent of the population are Hindus, has vowed revenge not merely against the perpetrators, but their “backers” – code for Pakistan, India’s western neighbour and an Islamic republic. India believes two of the three gunmen involved in the shooting were Pakistanis, while Islamabad denies any role in the incident and has called for international investigation.
But the Indian public is in a bloodthirsty mood. Jingoistic anchors and guests on their television news channels are in an unbridled war-mongering mode. In 2019, after a suicide bomber acting on behalf of a Pakistan-based terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 Indian paramilitary personnel in Pulwama, also in Kashmir, Modi retaliated with air strikes on a perceived terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
Srinath Raghavan, a professor at India’s Ashoka University and author of War and Peace in Modern India, recently said: “Now the threshold is pretty much of expectations domestically that there will be some military action. I don’t see how the government can walk away in the face of such a serious attack and not carry out actions at least at that level of threshold.”
In 2019, satellite imagery revealed Modi’s bombardment failed to hit any target of consequence. In a resultant dogfight between the two air forces, Pakistan, in fact, got the better of India by not only knocking down an Indian fighter plane but also capturing its pilot, who bailed out in Pakistan-controlled territory.
Mike Pompeo, the United States secretary of state at the time, wrote in his memoir that the world doesn’t properly know “just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019”.
Inherent in an Indo-Pak conflict is a propensity for superpower rivals, the US and China, backing opposite sides in a Cold War-type confrontation.
A former US state department spokesman, Ned Price, told Reuters: “If India feels that the Trump administration will back it to the hilt no matter what, we could be in store for more escalation and more violence between these nuclear-armed neighbours.” After meeting in Delhi last week to discuss trade and security, JD Vance warned that the 21st century could be a “very dark time for all humanity” if the countries fail to cooperate. Vance was pitching for the US to supply more military equipment to India, which has previously relied on Russian-made military supplies. “In India, America has a friend,” he said. “And we seek to strengthen the warm bonds our great nations already share … This is very much a win-win partnership.”
Meanwhile, Chinese news agency Xinhua quoted its foreign minister, Wang Yi, as saying, China “supports Pakistan in safeguarding its sovereignty and security interests”.
Pravin Sawhney, an Indian defence analyst, posted on X, “It is a triangular security matrix in South Asia where the PLA (China’s People’s Liberation Army) will support Pakistan military with its massive non kinetic capabilities & regular supply of spares, ammunitions, missiles & so on … Indian military will not have this war winning advantage. Moreover, there will be non-attributable PLA cyber fires in warzone & electronic fires in combat zone. PLA will help Pakistan military maintain superiority in the electromagnetic spectrum.”
Furthermore, a number of Turkish C-130 military transport aircraft, carrying undisclosed combat equipment, have reportedly landed in Pakistan, suggesting Ankara, too, may close ranks with Islamabad.
In February, a former director-general of the Pakistan Army’s espionage wing, Inter-Services Intelligence, said the Pakistan Army was furious about alleged Indian support to the Afghanistan-based anti-Pakistan outfit known as Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and to separatists in the western Pakistani province of Balochistan. An ambush of a Quetta to Peshawar train by Baloch nationalists on 11 March set tongues wagging in Pakistan that the powers-that-be were not going to let this go.
That was escalated on 15 April with a speech by Pakistan’s chief of army staff, General Asim Munir, which reflected an unprofessional hatred of India and Hindus. Since 1958, the Pakistan Army has either brazenly or from behind the scenes controlled the country. Seemingly, Indian intelligence either did not decipher the Pakistani mood or mistakenly ignored it.
On 9 April, the Indian home minister, Amit Shah boasted, “The Modi government’s sustained and coordinated efforts have crippled the entire terror ecosystem nurtured by hostile elements in Jammu and Kashmir.” If that were true, why would there be a need to maintain security forces numbering nearly a million in the region?
In 1989, Pakistan – as recompense for its eastern wing being severed from it and converted to an independent Bangladesh in a humiliating defeat to India in 1971 – began infiltrating into Indian Kashmir, which has a Muslim majority, with Pakistan-based militants. India started returning the compliment in the 1990s. The cycle of violent tit-for-tat continued with armed Pakistani terrorists murdering around 165 people, including one Briton, in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai in 2008.
On Indian Independence Day in 2016, Modi strangely claimed, “In the last few days, people of Balochistan … have thanked me, have expressed gratitude, and expressed good wishes for me.” This gave Pakistan ammunition to accuse India of fuelling secession in the Pakistani province. In short, the trading of terrorism in the Indian subcontinent has not been a one-way street, although it would be fair to say Pakistan has been more culpable than otherwise.
“The Resistance Front”, after initially signalling it was behind the Pahalgam atrocity, has since said it “unequivocally” denied its involvement. If, though, a Pakistan-based non-state organisation engineered the killings of innocent civilians, the onus is still on Pakistan to act against such an entity.
At the same time, Modi needs to present credible evidence to the international community about the Pakistani state itself being involved in the outrage to earn legitimacy for a cross-border operation. As the threat of escalation looms and the geo-political landscape shifts, the anxiety is that the fragile peace Kashmir has achieved could descend into an unsavoury conflict of our worst imaginations.
Cuts to STI clinics will make target to end HIV ‘impossible’
Cuts to sexual health clinics could make eliminating new HIV cases in England by 2030 “impossible”, politicians have warned.
A report on HIV services in the capital by the London Assembly Health Committee showed there were 6,008 new case in England in 2023 – almost double the amount in 2019, when 3,859 people were diagnosed.
Although much of the increase can be attributed to new testing in emergency departments, the figures show that even when these are excluded there has still been an increase over that period. Before that time, new cases had been falling.
Labour’s Krupesh Hirani, chair of the committee, told The Independent it would be “impossible” to hit the 2030 targets if public health budgets, that support testing and public outreach programs to target at-risk groups, aren’t protected and continue to be cut.
He said: “The importance of testing with HIV is well documented and well evidenced and the obvious outcome and benefit of testing is to make sure we identify people who may be living with HIV but also it will help if people know what their status is in terms of what action they can take.”
Richard Angell, chief executive of the charity Terrence Higgins Trust, which supports those with HIV, said: “The committee’s findings are clear: we are not currently on track to end new HIV cases in London – or in fact anywhere in the UK.
“Years of real-terms cuts to public health has meant long waiting lists to access pre-pxposure prophylaxis (the treatment drug PrEP) in many places and intense pressure on sexual health services.”
In their report, assembly members urged London Mayor Sadiq Khan to write to the health secretary, Wes Streeting to request an increase in the public health grant to 2015 levels in real terms by 2029. They also asked the mayor to request funding for HIV testing be provided in other healthcare settings, such as GP surgeries.
Another key recommendation was that PrEP medication is made available in pharmacies – a move that would need to be agreed by the Department for Health and Social Care.
Kat Smithson, chief executive for the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV told the committee: “When you look at the situation with sexual health and you consider that you cannot completely separate sexual health and HIV, and you look at rising STIs and you look at the pressure on sexual health services, I think it is impossible to say that we are on track to reach 2030.”
A separate target to reduce new HIV infections in England by 80 per cent by 2025 is also “unlikely”, Alison Brown, a consultant scientist at the UK Health Security Agency, told the committee.
Joes Mejia, 39, who was diagnosed in Colombia in 2008 and moved to the UK and now works as London HIV Ambassador with the Terrance Higgins Trust told The Independent testing is key.
“A lot of us [living with HIV] probably wouldn’t know their status if it weren’t because of a testing effort put somewhere. In my case, it was a primary care setting, and to this day, I’m really thankful for that test because if I hadn’t had it, I probably wouldn’t know my status, I probably wouldn’t be alive.”
Mr Mejia also warned services that cater to specific communities and their cultures are decreasing due to a lack of funding.
“When I came here at the time there were a couple of services for Latin American communities many of them don’t exist anymore, and many of them don’t exist anymore not because the community isn’t there or the diagnosis rate changed but they don’t exist because there is no particular funding for those services.”
“Service used to be way more robust 9-10 years ago; if they are here, they are reduced to the bare minimum. It is the same for black African and Caribbean communities, some services exist, but they are running on the bare minimum.”
A spokesperson for the mayor said: “The current government has committed to commissioning a new HIV action plan, and the mayor looks forward to working closely with ministers to help end HIV cases by 2030, as we build a fairer and healthier London for everyone. The mayor will respond to the Assembly’s report in due course.”