Britain: The number of gay and bisexual men contracting HIV rose over the past 20 years because many more are having unprotected sex

The number of British men having sex with another man without a condom rose by 26% between 1990 and 2010, the study by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) and University College London (UCL) showed. It comes weeks after a similar study warned that unsafe sexual behavior and a lack of testing was behind a failure to cut the number of cases of HIV among gay and bisexual men in the last decade in England and Wales. In November 2012, the HPA said that a record number of people in Britain were living with HIV, with the number of people with the virus reaching 96,000. But health officials also warned that a quarter of people who have the human immunodeficiency virus are not aware they have been infected. New diagnoses among gay men reached an all-time high in 2011, with 3,010 men discovering that they were infected. The HPA said that one in 20 men who have sex with men in Britain now had HIV, with the figure soaring to nearly one in 12 in London.