A doctor in Vancouver is urging the Canadian government to test everyone across the country for HIV as a way to eliminate the epidemic.
Dr. Julio Montaner, the director of B.C.’s Centre for Excellence in HIV and AIDS, says about 15 to 25 percent of people infected with HIV in Canada are not aware they have it, which contributes to the spread of the virus.
“The reason why the HIV epidemic persists, among other reasons, is because there’s a substantial number of people that have the infection that are not aware that they have it, and even worse, they are not even suspecting that they could have it,” says Montaner.
A few years ago Montaner and his team started noticing people walking into the emergency room with HIV who were not considered part of the “risk” group that is usually associated with the virus. So they decided to test all of those who would volunteer, rather than focus on whether they fitted the “risk” description.
“If I find everybody that is infected with HIV in the province of British Columbia and I have access to the treatment, which we do because our government has been exemplary in that regard and the treatment is available for free,” says Montaner, who explains that by finding these people who are infected, treatment can start earlier and the virus can be controlled.
When Montaner and his team started implementing volunteer testing, they found that one in 1,000 of people coming in were testing positive without the patients having any kind of suspicion that they were carriers of the virus. Many of them didn’t even show symptoms.