Longtime AIDS researcher meets Pope Francis

published on April 12, 2015 by Alistair Burns, in The BC Catholic

An AIDS research pioneer had the opportunity of a lifetime in March. He encountered a fellow Argentinian scientist: a chemist who wears a white zucchetto.

Doctor Julio Montaner, the director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, briefly met Pope Francis at a Wednesday audience in March. The Catholic doctor detailed groundbreaking prevention treatments to Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and others.

"I am very impressed by the influence [Pope Francis] is having way beyond the Church," Doctor Montaner told The B.C. Catholic.

Irene Day, the director of operations for the Centre for Excellence, who also attended, said priests and nuns peppered them with questions in private meetings. The highlight of her career was when she met the Pope.

"He asked me if I would pray for him," Day recalled. "It was so cool when he gave Julio a thumbs-up!"

Born in Argentina, Doctor Montaner joined St. Paul's Hospital in 1981, and became a faculty member involved in the AIDS research program six years later. In the 1980s, an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence.

In 1996 he unveiled highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART), a "triple-therapy cocktail" treatment that halts the progression of an HIV infection. Ten years later, he and his fellow researchers had definitively concluded that this "basically 100 per cent effective" treatment could "stop mortality, and secondarily, stop HIV transmission."

Day clarified how HAART works. Over a period of nine months, the cocktail stops the virus from replicating, and clears it from blood and sexual fluids.

"Babies do not have to be orphans," she said.

According to the B.C. Centre for Excellence, there was a decrease in HIV infections by 67 per cent from 1997 to 2013. AIDS-related deaths have declined by 87 per cent. Doctor Montaner said a typical 20-year-old male patient who receives treatments now has a life expectancy of 75 years.

A year ago, United Nations AIDS Program officials asked Doctor Montaner to advise them. They came up with the 90-90-90 global goals for 2020: 90 per cent of HIV-infected will actually know their HIV status, and this group of millions will receive anti-retroviral therapy, sustained to stop transmission.

The World Health Organization said there were 35 million HIV-positive people at the end of 2013. With this in mind, Doctor Montaner reached out to the Vatican and its "phenomenal reach" as the world's largest health-care provider.

While the HAART treatments cost approximately $15,000 a year in B.C., grants and aid have cut that price to $150 a year in Third World countries. "At 50 cents a day, this is totally doable for the majority of countries," Doctor Montaner said.

He mentioned an ambitious project in the diocese of Shinyanga, Tanzania, that employs the same sort of treatment.

Archbishop Zygmunt Zimowski, the president of the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers, said in February 2014 that the five-year project would test 120,000 Tanzanian residents. Of that number, he estimated, 20,000 would be HIV-positive. They would have immediate access, "without any charge, to the anti-retroviral drugs that they need."

"We still have a lot of work to do, no doubt about that," Day concluded. She added the Vatican meetings provided signs of encouragement about achieving an AIDS-free world.

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Longtime AIDS researcher meets Pope Francis

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