‘I feel pretty liberated’: How UBC students access PrEP

Alexander Tsang, a third-year Sauder student, started using PrEP in summer 2020 after a Grindr hookup.

“It was pretty sketchy,” he recalled of the hookup.

Tsang, who is from Vancouver, said he contacted a few clinics around the city before he was able to get on PrEP through the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC).

“It was hard to find the right people. But eventually, the people that I did contact sent me to the correct places.”

For Tsang and many other Queer people who have sex with men, taking PrEP is a way for them to feel safer when hooking up.

“I feel pretty liberated,” Tsang said. “Because we have a whole generation of gays that are dead [because of HIV]. I don’t actually have to suffer that.” He has since stopped taking PrEP because he is now in a monogamous relationship.

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The BC-CfE Laboratory is streamlining reporting processes for certain tests in order to simplify distribution and record-keeping, and to ensure completeness of results. Beginning September 2, 2025, results for the ‘Resistance Analysis of HIV-1 Protease and Reverse Transcriptase’ (Protease-RT) and ‘HIV-1 Integrase Resistance Genotype’ tests will be combined into a single ‘HIV-1 Resistance Genotype Report’.
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