Following the progress of the Equality Bill through parliament meant I had to get to grips with the rather bizarre terminology that our government uses.

I must admit to being a little disappointed that there wasn’t enough time for the bill to go through ‘ping pong’ where the two houses of parliament decide whether to accept each other’s amendments or not. Instead, the bill went into ’wash up’, which meant that the House of Commons nodded it through without a vote, accepting all of the Lords’ amendments.

The Equality Bill became the Equality Act and was one of the last laws to be passed before parliament was dissolved for the general election. The act is important for people with HIV because it strengthens anti-discrimination laws, especially in the context of employment.

As Eleanor Briggs from NAT explains (see Equal billing), one very important change is that employers will no longer be able to ask job applicants to complete detailed health questionnaires before they even attend an interview. From October on, questionnaires should only be completed once a provisional job offer has been made.

Another change is that if the partners, friends or family members of people with HIV are discriminated against because of their closeness to a person with HIV, they will be protected under the law too. And if someone suffers discrimination because they are wrongly assumed to have HIV, they will also be covered.

The Equality Act brings together nine previous laws covering discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, sexual orientation, disability and so on. In the past, these were always treated separately. The new law recognises that people can sometimes be discriminated against because of a combination of factors – for example, as a black person with HIV.

And the new law closes some legal loopholes that have been allowing discriminatory employers to wriggle out of their responsibilities.

Elsewhere in this issue, Derek Thaczuk examines one of the health issues that is emerging as a problem as people with HIV live longer and get older (see Skeleton Key). The thinning and weakening of the bones is not the concern exclusively of older women, but can affect HIV-positive men and women of all ages.

Researchers still lack clarity on whether this is an effect of HIV infection itself, or of the antiretroviral drugs used to treat it. What’s more, if the drugs are contributing to the problem, there’s no certainty about which drugs are the culprits.

So what can you do? As ever, a healthy lifestyle makes a difference and Derek outlines the specific recommendations on nutrition, exercise and smoking in his article.

On the subject of things you can do for yourself, in Try this at home, we explore self-insemination. For couples where the female partner has HIV and the male partner does not, it’s a low-tech way to get the sperm from the man to his partner without him risking HIV infection.