Three babies were born HIV-positive in Saskatchewan last year.
The rate of new infections is more than double the national rate and in some of the hardest-hit communities, infection rates rival some of the poorest and most under-developed nations in the world.
Yet the provincial government has no strategy in place to combat what is – in most of the developed world – a manageable chronic disease.
Now a group of Saskatchewan doctors is calling on the provincial government to declare a public health state of emergency over the continued spread of HIV and AIDS in the province.
“We’re continuing to see high levels or mortality and morbidity, so people getting sick and actually dying from their HIV, which is seen very rarely in other parts of the country,” says Dr. Ryan Meili, one of 30 Saskatchewan physicians who signed an open letter this week to the provincial government.
For the past decade, Saskatchewan has had the highest rate of HIV infection in Canada.
There were 158 new cases diagnosed last year. That amounts to 13.8 cases per 100,000 people, more than double the 2014 Canada-wide rate of 5.8 per 100,000.
“Spread across the entire province, 158 new cases may not seem like a lot,” says the letter from the physicians.
“However, certain communities – urban, rural and reserve – have been hit particularly hard, with local epidemics that rival some of the hardest hit regions of the world.”
In the past decade, 1,515 people in the province have been diagnosed with HIV. Seventy-one per cent or 1,075 cases were First Nations and MÂŽtis people, though indigenous people account for just 20 per cent of the overall population.
“With timely diagnosis and using the tools we now have available for managing HIV, hospitalization and death due to HIV complications should be rare events. Unfortunately, as physicians, we are regularly seeing patients who are very sick from the effects of HIV, many of whom did not know that they were HIV-positive,” the doctors say.