A few days before ringing in the New Year, I received an email notification that got me super excited about the future of HIV prevention. I needed the boost – the omicron surge of COVID-19 was just starting to tear through communities across the country, and had even hit my own household, making for a painfully lonely holiday season just as my husband and our kids were starting the school winter break.
“Blood. It’s in you to give.” Or so the old slogan from Canadian Blood Services (CBS)* would have you believe. Of course, they have a long history of filtering who gets to give. Currently, there are many Canadians who want to give but cannot, including all HIV-negative cisgender men who’ve had sex with another man in the past three months. This includes men who are in monogamous relationships, always use pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), always use condoms during sex, and who have oral but not anal sex. This policy has long been viewed as homophobic by many community members and community-based...
HIV self-testing was approved in Canada in November 2020, largely thanks to research conducted by REACH Nexus, part of Unity Health Toronto’s Map Centre for Urban Health Solutions. But approval does not mean access – the next step is getting self-tests into the hands of people who don’t know they have HIV, and linking them to follow-up treatment and care.
Harm reduction and gay men’s HIV prevention could be considered two historic elements in our HIV response that have long stood separate from one another. Traditionally, HIV prevention with gay men focused on sexual risk, while harm reduction focused on risks associated with injection drug use. Both approaches have evolved over the decades and some might argue that safer sex is a form of harm reduction, but in the context of drug use, there has been little focus given to harm reduction in the context of gay men’s sexual health.
À Ottawa, les gars gais, bisexuels, bispirituels, queer et d’autres gars qui aiment gars, que nous soyons cis ou trans (GBT2Q), avons de quoi être fiers. Ce sont des membres de nos communautés qui ont fondé MAX, le premier organisme avec un mandat de santé globale GBT2Q de l’Ontario (et le troisième au Canada). Cet hiver et ce printemps, voici cinq autres bonnes nouvelles pour le bien-être de nos communautés :
