What is hepatitis C? How many people in Canada are affected? With World Hepatitis Day approaching on July 28, service providers have an opportunity to raise awareness about the impact of hepatitis C across Canada. To help you get the message out to the communities you serve, CATIE has produced a series of infographics.
Sex education is rarely without controversy. As a sexual health educator, working with South Asian communities all over Toronto, I see firsthand how sexual misinformation, stigma, cultural and gender norms can all make sex a hard topic to discuss. Lately, however, it seems to be all everyone wants to talk about.
The development of treatment for the cure of hepatitis C (HCV) is moving at a dizzying pace. Indeed, the entire HCV story is one of an unusually fast trajectory, not only the speed of treatment development, but also the spread of the virus. While early cures were injection-based, difficult to tolerate, and boasting a mere 50% success rate after a year of treatment, there now exist cures that involve one pill, once a day, for a regimen that often doesn’t exceed twelve weeks. There are clinical trials being conducted presently to evaluate the efficacy of new treatments at eight and...
For those of us who work in HIV and Hep C prevention, the advent of new prevention approaches has made us increasingly dependent on evidence for making informed decisions about the best strategies to use with a particular client or community.
In Canada and in much of the Western world, thanks to the advent of combination antiretroviral therapy, there has been a clear improvement in health status and increased life expectancy of people living with HIV approaching that of the general population. However, despite these medical advances, negative public perception about HIV has yet to catch up to the reality that most clinicians encounter. The reality for the most part is of healthy and conscientious patients looking to improve their quality of life.
While HIV does not discriminate and can affect anyone, Canada’s HIV epidemic is concentrated in key populations – a result of both biological risk factors and the social determinants of health. While roughly one out of every 10,000 Canadians is newly infected with HIV every year, the HIV incidence rate is much higher among Aboriginal peoples, Canadians born in countries where HIV is endemic, people who inject drugs, and men who have sex with men.
