World AIDS Day arrives each December 1 with a sense of sadness, but there was cause to celebrate in British Columbia last December. That was when provincial Health Minister Adrian Dix officially declared that A IDS was no longer an epidemic in British Columbia, but an endemic concern.
Accompanying Dix that day at the opening of the new labora-tory of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE) was BC-CfE’s executive director, Dr. Julio Montaner, the man who has spearheaded research and treatment in reducing rates of HIV infection, mortality and transmission.
What a difference from the 1980s, when Argentina-born Mon-taner first started at Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital, epicentre of HIV/AIDS in this country. A pulmonary physician, he encountered numerous AIDS patients whose compromised immune systems often meant pneumonia became a death sentence.
Invited to Canada by James Hogg, a University of British Columbia pulmonary physiologist whom he met at a medical conference in Uruguay, and mentored by the clinical pharmacologist John Ruedy, Montaner decided to devote his life to alleviating and preventing HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, and stopping AIDS, ac-quired immune deficiency syndrome – often called Stage 3 HIV – from killing people. And he used an approach that his father, also named Julio, employed to tackle tuberculosis: try different things, including different drugs, to fight the dragon.