The debate will soon be over.
One of the world’s foremost authorities on HIV/AIDS believes that by the time experts leave Vancouver at the end of a milestone international conference this week there can be no disputing the path to eradicating the disease going forward.
Thousands of experts have convened on Canada’s West Coast for the 8th International AIDS Society Conference of HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment & Prevention from July 19-22.
Dr. Julio Montaner, the clinical director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, said he championed for Vancouver as the host city for the conference this year because the research being presented this week will, once and for all, silence critics of the Treatment as Prevention model he pioneered and first presented on the same stage in 1996.
The made-in-B.C. model advocates for the use of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) to suppress a patient’s viral load – allowing them to live relatively healthy lives while also dramatically decreasing the odds of them spreading the disease to others.
In B.C., the model has seen HIV-related morbidity decline 90 per cent since 1999.
Last week, the United Nations said it has played a pivotal role when announcing it has met its millennial development goal of halting and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Still, many jurisdictions (such as the Canada, where the federal government is opposed to several harm reduction initiatives) have yet to endorse the model.
Montaner says two new studies being presented for the first time this week – which prove early treatment before the virus has a chance to compromise a patient’s immune system cuts the risk of serious illness or death in half – will definitively answer the few remaining questions surrounding the effectiveness of the model he pitched nearly 20 years ago at the height of the AIDS epidemic.