A made-in-Canada approach to tackling the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been endorsed by the United Nations for use around the world but has yet to gain the support of the Canadian government.
It’s been a vindicating and frustrating week for Julio Montaner, director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.
Montaner’s a pioneer of the “treatment as prevention” form of attacking HIV. It’s predicated on the idea of giving highly active antiretroviral therapy to everyone infected with HIV, even if they aren’t showing signs of illness yet. It also advocates giving similar treatment to people deemed to be at high risk of contracting HIV.
When the UN’s World Health Organization used that model in its updated guidelines for HIV treatment this week, it added at least 9 million HIV-positive people to the population of those in need of highly active antiretrovirals, and many more to the group of at-risk people needing treatment.
It’s “really the end of a decade worth of work, basically, leading to a global recognition that treatment as prevention is the way forward. And we are now on a global path, as pioneered by British Columbia, to implement a strategy to control and eliminate AIDS as a pandemic,” Montaner said in an interview.