Current HIV prevention efforts have and continue to fail Black same-gender-loving (SGL)* men. But with meaningful reflection and changes to service delivery, this can change.
In 2019, we saw significant developments in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of HIV and hepatitis C. We helped launch a blueprint for hepatitis C elimination in Canada. We witnessed innovation in HIV prevention and testing approaches, more people cured of hepatitis C, and “the London patient”, the second person cleared of HIV after discontinuing antiretroviral therapy. We also saw drawbacks. We continue to confront a devastating opioid overdose crisis driven by a poisoned drug supply, which claimed the lives of more than 2,000 Canadians in the first six months of the year alone.
CATIE recently launched its Can’t Pass It On campaign to increase awareness that people living with HIV on effective treatment can’t pass it on to a partner. The series features real serodifferent couples with one HIV-positive and one HIV-negative partner. CATIE sat down with one of these couples, Rainer Oktovianus and Eka Nasution, to learn more about their story and why they chose to participate in the campaign.
HIV is not what it used to be. Many people with HIV describe it as a chronic condition and a manageable part of their life. HIV prevention is not what it used to be, either. The simultaneous rise of “undetectable equals untransmittable” (U=U) and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) caused a radical change in the way we talk about HIV transmission and prevention.
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...
“Chasing the new is dangerous to society.” I read this quote at an activist art exhibition and it got me thinking about Halifax, my city, and of the group that I belong to. What if the old way of healthcare is actually dangerous to society at a whole?
