At this year’s International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2018) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, we witnessed several pivotal developments in the global HIV response. We also saw some setbacks in our efforts to prevent infections and improve the lives of people living with HIV. From clinical science and epidemiology to human rights and advocacy, here are some highlights of the good news and the bad news from AIDS 2018.
Historically, people living with HIV in Canada have been excluded from access to life insurance. In recent years, however, both Manulife and Sun Life have started accepting applications from people living with HIV, now that HIV is widely recognized as a manageable chronic illness. Nevertheless, this significant change in policy is not well-known within the HIV sector. How can we change that and how can we facilitate access to life insurance for people living with HIV? With these two questions in mind, we at Realize and the Canadian Positive People Network (CPPN) surveyed our members and the insurance sector to...
It’s not surprising that PositiveLite.com —what we called Canada’s online HIV magazine but it was, I’d argue, so much more —came to an end on March 31. It had been going for nine years. It was a unique model run by people living with HV for people living with HIV. Most people thought we had big offices; in fact, we operated out of our own homes. We were independent in all senses of the word.
This past year the Canadian Aboriginal AIDS Network (CAAN) held its annual gathering, on the theme of “transforming wholistic approaches to Indigenous health.” It’s a gathering of First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, combining a business meeting, a gathering of Aboriginal people with HIV/AIDS, and the ‘Wise Practices’ research conference. But more importantly, it is a gathering of colleagues who have become friends, clients who have become peers, people with HIV who have become community leaders, and an extended family. Also present are elders welcoming delegates to their traditional lands, and children – the younger ones mostly playing with each...
The partnerships forged between people living with HIV and researchers have been an essential foundation upon which the response to the HIV epidemic has grown. And the time has come to reaffirm and recommit to principles of inclusion and respect in the conduct of presenting research findings that impacts on our lives.
For people living with HIV and their allies, 2017 was a ground-breaking year. It culminated with both the federal and Ontario governments publicly recognizing the need to limit the over-criminalization of HIV in Canada. On World AIDS Day 2017, both acknowledged that criminal prosecution for alleged HIV non-disclosure is not warranted when a person living with HIV has a “suppressed viral load” (i.e., less than 200 copies of HIV/ml of blood) because such an individual poses no “realistic possibility” of transmitting the virus—the Supreme Court’s legal test for whether a duty to disclose exists.
