We’re a couple of local photographers, and for the past year we’ve been shooting Vancouverites for So It Is: Vancouver, a coffee table book that shows why we’re proud to call this place home. The book profiles a bunch of people who live here today, and through them we tell the story of the city we live in today. If you think this book should exist, we need your help to make it happen.
Dr Julio Montaner, OC, M.D., OBC D.Sc., FRCPC, FCCP, FACP, FRSC
Downtown at St Paul’s Hospital there’s an office full of papers, notes, awards, photos of the occupant with various heads of state, and a fair few coffee mugs.
The office belongs to Dr Julio Montaner, and he is one of the world’s leading authorities on HIV / AIDs.
He has authored more than 650 papers on HIV / AIDs since the later 1980’s, and was instrumental in developing triple therapy (HAART) which has been credited with saving 3 million years of life around the world.
Vancouver artist and activist Tiko Kerr is one of the many people who credit Dr Montaner with saving their life. After his diagnosis in 1985, Kerr developed resistance to every HIV drug with which he was treated over the following two decades.
In 2005 Dr Montaner requested that Health Canada allow the use two experimental drugs that were not on the Canadian market to treat Kerr and five other patients, but the request was initially denied. The doctor battle on, and eventually won. Within five days of starting the treatment Tiko Kerr’s viral load had dropped by 90%, and within a month it was undetectable.
Dr Montaner and the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV / AIDs also pioneered the creation of the model of Treatment as Prevention (TasP) to decrease the progression of HIV to AIDS, and also to prevent HIV transmission. The TasP model has now been embraced by the United Nations in an effort to end the global AIDs epidemic by 2030.
It’s hard not to write more about an MD graduate who came from Argentina to do a one-year post-doctorate at UBC, and then ended up staying in Vancouver and changing the world. But every time you walk past St Paul’s, remember that he is one of many people in that building who are changing the lives of millions every day.