Search Results for: what hit hard

HIV prevention during the COVID-19 pandemic: How it started, how it’s going

Now, more than a year after the first Canadian COVID-19 case, we are struggling not just with a second, simultaneous pandemic in addition to HIV/AIDS, which has resulted in a change in the way people connect, engage in sexual activity and seek healthcare. This has an impact on how people access and take PrEP and has created a whole new set of challenges to address.

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What topics in the CATIE Blog were top of mind in 2020?

The year 2020 will leave an indelible mark on our collective consciousness: across the world, people are confronted with the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and it seems to have consumed our lives. For many of us, not a day goes by that we don’t think about the virus, how it has altered our daily activities and what we need to do for our communities to remain healthy. Since the virus hit Canada in March 2020, service providers from across the country have mobilized to keep their clients safe and provide them the care and services they need to prevent, test...

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Satellite Sites: Providing harm reduction from the homes of people who use drugs

The term “satellite sites” is used to refer to informal harm reduction hubs operating out of the homes of people who use drugs. Operating in Toronto for more than 20 years, these sites offer access to sterile drug use supplies outside of more formal settings like health centres. Although many satellite sites offer much more than this – including naloxone and overdose response training, needle disposal and referrals to healthcare services. Satellite programs emerged from the recognition that people who use drugs were already doing this work within their communities, operating informally to meet harm reduction needs and respond to a range of other health needs.

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Can Halifax open Atlantic Canada’s first legal overdose prevention site? Yes, we can!

This blog post is a follow-up from an earlier post published on July 11, 2019. As I work on a new funding proposal, this statement strikes me: over 11,500 people in Canada have lost their lives as a result of opioid-related overdoses between January 2016 and December 2018 and we keep losing people every day. So many lives lost! And why is that? The evidence is clear that overdose prevention sites save lives! After I returned from a hands-on training in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, one of the hardest hit places in the overdose crisis, it became even...

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A step by step process on how we can support mothers living with HIV

As doctors specializing in the clinical care of women living with HIV, we often get questions about breastfeeding and the transmission of HIV. Here’s just one e-mail we received from an infectious disease specialist outside Ontario: “I am seeing a young African woman as a patient who is HIV positive, had advanced disease, but now is suppressed. She is pregnant and had two deliveries in Africa, where she was encouraged to breastfeed. She is still quite adamant about breastfeeding despite my counselling otherwise. How do you manage these situations and what is your approach to this?”

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Lessons learned from the HCV Symposium Part 2: Equal access, equal representation

On February 27, 2016 CATIE had the opportunity to host another Learning Institute (LI) at the 5th Canadian Symposium on HCV in Montreal, Quebec. Learning Institutes are exciting knowledge-exchange and capacity-building opportunities for stakeholders engaged in Hep C prevention, treatment and care across Canada. Our 15 rapporteurs learned about current research and worked together to summarize that information and bring it back to their communities.

In part two of this two-part blog series, two rapporteurs reflect on their experiences at the LI.

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