The Ontario Court of Appeal upheld a decision to strike down Canada’s prostitution laws for failing to protect sex workers’ health and safety. BC-CfE legally intervened in the case. The Supreme Court of Canada will hear the case in 2013.
A study published by the Gender and Sexual Health Initiative (GSHI) of the BC-CfE shows availability of indoor sex spaces is potentially life saving to sex workers and reduces violence, HIV risk, and improve relationships with police.
The Washington D.C. Declaration to End the AIDS Epidemic became the official declaration of the International AIDS Conference, seeking to build support for beginning to end the AIDS epidemic through a nine-point action plan, centered around the Made in BC-HIV Treatment as Prevention strategy.
During his closing speech at the International AIDS Conference in Washington DC, former U.S. President Bill Clinton called for increased political will and investment to end the AIDS epidemic, when he said:
“We’ll have to heed Julio Montaner’s years of pleas to implement Treatment as Prevention and implement combination prevention programs, we can save a lot of lives if all this is done.”
BC-CfE’s Dr. Evan Wood named Tier 1 Canadian Research Chair in Inner City Medicine at UBC.
Goldcorp announced funding for new BC-CfE-led Addiction Medicine fellowship, Dr. Evan Wood is appointed to lead the Addictions Medicine Program.
A BC-CfE study published in PLOS One showed highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) reduces new HIV diagnoses, deaths and HIV prevalence.
BC-CfE develops a new metric called the Programmatic Compliance Score (PCS) to help identify individuals who are at a high risk of mortality as a result of improper disease management in the beginning of treatment. Through validation of the metric, researchers found adherence to HIV treatment guidelines significantly increases survival.
Minister of Health Margaret MacDiarmid announces $19.9-million provincial roll out of the BC-CfE-pioneered Seek and Treat for Optimal Prevention of HIV/AIDS (STOP HIV/AIDS) pilot project. The roll out will expand to include the following Health Authorities: Fraser, Vancouver Island, Interior Health Northern and Vancouver Coastal to ensure HIV positive individuals have access to the best care and treatment and to further reduce HIV transmissions in British Columbia.
Two new studies from BC-CfE find homelessness and a history of childhood sexual abuse, are key factors in promoting youth injection drug use. Results published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found youth who were homeless were almost twice as likely to inject drugs than youth who were not homeless. In a separate study published in Preventive Medicine, researchers found those reporting childhood sexual abuse were more than two-and-a-half times as likely to start injecting drugs as compared to those who had no history of such abuse.
