§ Mr. Gareth WardellTo ask the Secretary of State for Health what is the correlation coefficient between the incidence of HIV infection and the incidence of tuberculosis in England over the period 1980 to 1990.
§ Mrs. Virginia Bottomley[holding answer 7 June 1990]: The reported number of people with HIV infection has increased during the 1980s in England and Wales and in a small proportion of those who have progressed to develop AIDS, tuberculosis has occurred. However, no evidence of a correlation between the HIV epidemic and the overall incidence of tuberculosis has been identified so far in England and Wales.
Tuberculosis incidence, as measured by notifications, has been declining by approximately 5 per cent. per year in recent decades, but the rate of decline varies from year to year. Total notifications for England and Wales in 1988 (5,161) were 1.5 per cent. higher than the total in 1987 (5,086), but such small annual increases have been seen from time to time (in 1973, 1975, 1978 and 19860 with a subsequent resumption of the downward trend. The small increase that was seen in 1988 occurred mainly in the younger females and the elderly age group.