AN MP living with HIV says the UK has a chance at abolishing transmissions.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle, the MP for Brighton Kemptown, became the second MP after Chris Smith to announce he had HIV in 2018.

The 35-year-old recalled wishing his diagnosis was “a kind of nightmare that you wake up from, but it’s not” during an interview with GM News.

Mr Russell-Moyle came out as gay as a teenager but says he had known about his sexuality in primary school.

He said when he was diagnosed with HIV during his second year of university, “most people’s minds, it was still a death sentence, so it was still something very tragic”.

According to Mr Russell-Moyle, of the 20 people newly infected with HIV in Brighton in the last year, only three were new transmissions – the remaining were historic cases where people had lived with it without knowing.

“So, if we treat those people – once you’re on treatment you can’t pass it on – and so, it means that you stop being able to get new infections,” he said.

“We could quite realistically… and Brighton has got a high number of HIV diagnoses compared to some other towns and cities the same size, because of historic reasons and the community… we could really do that. We could really achieve that.”

Mr Russell-Moyle announced his HIV status during an emotional speech in the House of Commons in 2018.

“I wanted that burden off me, I didn’t want to be having to look over my shoulder,” he said.

He said the country was also at “a crux point where we could abolish HIV transmissions”.

The MP said while that was a “miracle of science compared to where we’ve got in 30 years” he also warned against “a danger that we’ve dropped at the last hurdle” and the last groups of people were not reached.

He said although times had changed since he was diagnosed, remembering how “you kind of think this is some horrible joke, you wish it was a horrible joke”, he said there was a fine balancing act to be achieved when discussing the condition.

“We don’t want to go around saying, ‘oh, don’t worry about it anymore, you don’t need to use any protection, we can just treat it with a pill’,” he said.

“But equally, we want to dispel the kind of fear around it, so that we say to people ‘if you do have it, it’s not a problem’.

“Thankfully we have come now to the debate, which is about what costs the least amount of money, and what saves the most amount of lives. Well, it’s about providing the medicine when you can and in a wealthy country like ours, we can.”