After major breakthroughs that have twice changed the worldwide norm of AIDS therapy within the past 15 years, British Columbia’s pioneering treatment/research centre is taking the fight against the disease to a new level.
Feeding on its own convincing evidence that the more aggressively you treat HIV, the more you reduce the chance of the virus being spread to others, the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS is the inspiration behind a bold, four-year project to seek out the most difficult and vulnerable AIDS population of all.
Those are the thousands of individuals in the province who don’t know they have the virus, or, who do know, but are not receiving treatment.
“We are going to go where the people are,” says Susan Burgess, a physician working in the drug-ravaged Downtown Eastside who has about 160 AIDS patients. “If we can find them, we can give them effective care.”