ABSTRACT
A recent report from the Working Party of the Public Health Laboratory Service has suggested that the AIDS epidemic in the United Kingdom is now entering a more complex phase (Public Health Laboratory Service Working Group, 1990). Since the mid-1980s, the incidence of HIV has declined markedly in the major exposure category of homosexually active men. The present epidemic is made up of a series of separate but interlinked epidemics in other exposure categories such as injecting drug users and heterosexual contacts of infected individuals. Drug users who share injecting equipment have long been a focus of research interest. Given this changing pattern, attention is now turning to those groups likely to transmit second-generation HIV infection within the heterosexual population through sexual contact. While intravenous drug users clearly play an important role in this, bisexual men have also been identified as potentially having a significant role.
