Making people responsible for their own health is admirable, but clearly isn't working. One look at the latest warnings over obesity show that many thousands of families fail to eat proper meals or take exercise. A similar failure to behave sensibly is writ even larger when it comes to that more secretive pursuit, sex.

Statistics show there has been a 20 per cent increase in diagnoses of HIV in 2003. Experts at the Health Protection Agency believe that when final figures come in, more than 7,000 new cases will have been identified. Four-fifths of the heterosexual cases were contracted abroad in high-risk countries, but there was a significant rise here in both heterosexual and gay infections.

Most alarming is the fact that probably one-third of people in Britain with HIV are unaware they have the infection. They may therefore infect new partners, and if the carriers are pregnant that infection will be passed on to the unborn baby. This is unnecessary: new drug therapies mean doctors can largely prevent transmission and the misery it entails.

It should be remembered that a 16-year-old boy today will have no memory of the horror first created by the early emergence of the disease. But what is unforgiveable is the hurdles people still face in trying to be tested for the disease. There's a six-week wait simply to get a test. How can this be justified when we give women a maximum two-week referral to a cancer specialist? Is the potential HIV diagnosis, with all the possibilities of others being infected, really less important than the potential breast cancer case?

We report today of a rapid one-hour test for HIV which should be introduced as quickly as possible. The Terrence Higgins Trust has done well to pioneer such a scheme, but it is NHS leaders who should prioritise it, unless we want to see thousands of others infected.