Vancouver doctor and world-renowned AIDS researcher Dr. Julio Montaner sat in United Nations general assembly in New York on Thursday as the UN endorsed an ambitious new plan to fight the AIDS epidemic globally, and end the epidemic by 2030.
Montaner, director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, was the chief architect of the so-called 90-90-90 strategy, which was presented to the UN.
“We are making an AIDS-free generation a closer reality all around the world,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the UNAIDS meeting. “We need to end the era of AIDS, period… We know what to do, we just have to do it.”
Montaner said Friday, after his return to Vancouver, that the new UN strategy was based on the made-in-BC model of treatment as prevention pioneered by Montaner and his team in the city.
“This is an idea that emerged in B.C. more than a decade ago,” he explained. “It can be reproduced in countries that are very poor.”
Montaner’s only disappointment was that Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t present the new global AIDS strategy to the UN.
“This is a squandered opportunity,” he said, adding that the prime minister’s office seems to have an aversion to the people who are at high-risk of contracting AIDS – gay men, prostitutes and intravenous drug users.
Neal Hall
Metro News
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