A strain of HIV that is highly resistant to almost all anti-retroviral drugs and which leads to the rapid onset of Aids has been detected in New York.

This, from a front-page Observer article, is more than a little worrying. New York was the place where HIV was first discovered, too.

If this is a genuine new strain of the HIV, then this could be absolutely devastating – just as we’re beginning to get used to an HIV that people can live with for many years before developing AIDS, we could be taken back decades to HIV being an immediately destructive virus.

It is incredibly disappointing to see the Observer, of all papers, pandering to the notion of HIV as a ‘gay disease’, despite it being more prevalent in heterosexual populations:

Health officials have warned that gay men are becoming increasing lax in their attitude to sexual health.

This isn’t the kind of thing the Observer would normally do, so I’m intrigued as to why they have done. This is much more like Times territory, and – guess what – this is what their (buried) article has to say:

It’s a wake-up call to men who have sex with men

To really tackle the problem of HIV, this is exactly the kind of stigma that needs to be avoided.