This September, the BC-CfE’s Executive Director & Physician-in-Chief Dr. Julio Montaner was honoured by Canada Post as part of their Medical Groundbreakers stamp series.
The new stamps honour groundbreaking contributions to medicine and include six Canadian physicians and researchers who revolutionized their fields of health care.
Alongside Dr. Montaner, those chosen by Canada Post include Drs. Bruce Chown, Balfour Mount, M. Vera Peters, James Till and Ernest McCulloch.
Dr. Montaner’s work, for which he’s dedicated four decades of his life, has helped transform HIV/AIDS into a manageable condition with a near-normal life expectancy and has also drastically reduced HIV transmission.
He led the development of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), now considered the global standard of care and also pioneered Treatment as Prevention (TasP), a strategy that has markedly reduced HIV transmission and has the potential to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic worldwide.
Fiona Dalton, President and CEO, Providence Health Care, said, “I think there are real lessons we can learn now from how we managed a different virus, HIV, in the early ’80s – a virus that was really scary that we didn’t know anything about, which we had no treatment for, and we can see that again with COVID now.” Dalton added, “We are really benefiting from that work in terms of HIV/AIDS and how we can apply that to our new pandemic.”
Eric Harris, the board chair at Providence Health Care, praised Dr. Montaner, and said, “He is brilliantly fearless, to the point of being breathtaking on occasion, but it’s always backed up by organization, discipline, and clinical work.”
Those organizational skills were on full display as Dr. Montaner worked as a guiding force behind the 1996 International AIDS Society Conference, where he introduced HAART as a new global standard of care for HIV. The 1996 conference is widely seen as a turning point in HIV/AIDS history thanks to this revolutionary treatment.
Within a year of implementing HAART in BC, AIDS deaths decreased by over 80%. As BC saw success in its HIV treatment approach, Dr. Montaner recognized gaps in care among those with socio-economic, cultural, or disease-related challenges, and his research informed harm reduction strategies in Vancouver including at InSite in the Downtown Eastside, North America’s first supervised injection site.
In 2006 Dr. Montaner demonstrated through models and a wealth of research findings from BC’s experience that universal coverage with HAART could lead to the control and possible elimination of HIV within a generation. This, along with a landmark paper published in The Lancet in 2010, formed the basis for the BC-CfE’s TasP strategy, which has since been formally adopted in many countries around the world and by the World Health Organization and Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
TasP then became the cornerstone of UNAIDS’ 90-90-90 strategy in 2014, and recently helped inspire another game-changing initiative, U=U. The U=U campaign informs the public, healthcare professionals and policy-makers about the tenets of TasP, that those living with HIV who are successfully on HAART treatment and have an undetectable viral load are untransmittable.
The continued success of TasP in reducing new diagnoses led St. Paul’s Hospital to repurpose their AIDS Ward in 2014 and Dr. Montaner to declare the end of the AIDS epidemic in BC in 2019. The province, once the hardest hit by HIV/AIDS in Canada, now sees the disease as a chronic but manageable condition.
Dr. Montaner continues to see patients, lead BC-CfE HIV treatment & research efforts, advocate for access to care, harm reduction & safe supply, and established the Hope to Health Centre in the DTES to ensure no one goes without the care they deserve.
Having previously been invested in the Order of Canada and inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, Dr. Montaner said, “This particular honour has unique significance because I view it as the recognition from the people of my adopted country, Canada.”
The image on Dr. Montaner’s stamp was designed by Vancouver’s Mike Savage and Dale Kilian at Signals including photography by BC-CfE Website and Digital Strategy Coordinator Fernando Prado.
The PermanentTM domestic rate stamps are available in a booklet of 10 and can be purchased at canadapost.ca/shop.