• sexual health
• HIV
• sexual networks

One cold January evening in 2009, I wrote a last-minute application to become Editor in Chief of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI) journal, backstage at an amateur pantomime. My job that evening was to ensure a heavily greasepainted menagerie of little girls (including mine) safely made their way to and from the stage in various guises. Inevitably I reflected that this was not a good moment to be applying for such a responsible role outside my ‘day job’ let alone the rest of my life—but I know if I didn’t, I would always regret it.

An Editor in Chief is the accountable editor for a professional clinical journal, and key to STI is its role as an official journal of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV, which began life as the Medical Society for the Study of Venereal Diseases. This position offers a unique opportunity to help colleagues shape their field of clinical practice at home, and also to link them to global developments and reflect on a wider picture. The archive of STI, dating back to 1925 as the British Journal of Venereology, provides a fascinating history of how our preoccupations have changed.1 2 After penicillin, AIDS, human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccination and molecular diagnostics, these early beginnings seem worlds away. Still, even in a decade there have been major developments both in clinical science and the …