How’s it going?
These three little words have tremendous power. Sent as a simple text message, it creates an opportunity for dialogue between a case manager and a person seeking health care.
L’AFRAVIH est une conférence scientifique, organisée tous les deux ans par l’Alliance francophone des acteurs de santé contre le VIH. Elle avait lieu cette année du 20 au 23 avril à Bruxelles, rassemblant plus d’un millier de participants, venus d’Europe, d’Afrique, d’Asie ou d’Amérique du Nord. L’AFRAVIH ouvre un espace de débat francophone unique pour les acteurs de la lutte contre le VIH et les hépatites virales. La conférence est l’occasion de discuter avec des intervenants très divers, issus du milieu communautaire, de la recherche ou de la santé publique. Difficile de faire le tri dans un programme aussi riche… Mais voici trois points à retenir de la conférence!
The administration of naloxone, a chemical compound that effectively temporarily reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, is recommended by the World Health Organization to be used in the case of an opioid overdose. Naloxone is currently available in Canada only in an injectable form and by prescription only; it can only be administered to the person named on the prescription, not to a third party.
Lesbian, bisexual and queer women are rarely included in HIV research. Women who have sex with women, and their HIV infection rates, are not captured anywhere because women cannot report having a woman as a sexual partner in Canada’s HIV statistics. The current record only allows women to report HIV exposure either through injection drug use or heterosexual sex. This contributes to the erasure of women’s sexual and gender diversity and fluidity in HIV research. Queer* women are ignored in HIV research: this is a problem and here is why it matters.
There are a lot of new test technologies in the pipeline: both new types of tests in the works, such as rapid syphilis tests or point-of-care HIV viral load testing, and new ways to use existing tests, such as self-testing or online testing. As testing options increase, we need to think about where they will have the most impact. I learned about this from helping implement a new test technology called pooled nucleic acid amplification testing (pooled NAAT) at six clinics in Vancouver in 2009, as part of a research study to determine the impact of this new type of...
On December 1, World AIDS Day, The Hon. Dr. Jane Philpott, Canada’s Minister of Health, declared that our country endorses the UNAIDS treatment targets that look to seeing an end to the global AIDS epidemic by 2030. On the same day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a statement that, in part, declared “we are now at a point where we can envision a future free of this terrible disease.”
