Kevin McKenna

It is a pleasure, Dr Allin-Khan, to serve under your chairmanship. I say a massive thank you to the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) for securing this debate. I thank everyone involved in the all-party parliamentary group on HIV, AIDs and sexual health, and every organisation that has already been mentioned today, from the Terrence Higgins Trust to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Actually, I also thank all those small, everyday champions: people who are positive; people who have been allies of people who are positive; everyone who has worked in the bioscience sector; and everyone who has worked in the health sector. This has been a collective effort, involving thousands and thousands of people in this country, to get us to a point where we are potentially only a few years away from eradicating all new transmissions of HIV. As the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale said in opening this debate, we are also in LGBT+ History Month. In the LGBT community we are used having a lot of clashes, such as Pride happening at the same time as Wimbledon and Glastonbury; we are just used to it. This debate has put me in a very reflective mood, as did being elected to Parliament and moving from nursing into this world. I was 11 when I realised I was gay; that was in 1985. It was just as everything was hotting up around the AIDS pandemic. It was a pretty scary world to step into. By the time I was properly coming out in the early 1990s, I met lots and lots of friends, including friends and lovers who had AIDS or HIV. I spent a lot of time going to hospitals, and it was there that I realised nursing would be something that suited me. So, it was partly in response to the AIDS epidemic that I was driven along the career path that I was. I also remember the abject terror of getting early HIV tests, particularly before I became a student nurse; a positive test could have stopped that career dead in its tracks at that point. I will not comment on the age of everyone in this room, but I think like many people in this room I have lived right the way through this pandemic. Of course, by the time I was finally diagnosed with HIV it had changed again, but that was still 20 years on. So I have lived for a long time as an HIV-positive man. There was a time in my life when friends were taking tablets that did have quite severe side effects, some of which were actually very unpleasant and led to them still suffering from HIV and then AIDS. Now, it has whittled down to one tablet a day, and as I get into my 50s it sits alongside my statins and my arthritis medication—all the other medications that we all have at a certain point in our lives. That is the difference.