bc centre for excellence in hiv/aids

 By: Chris Selley, National Post

 

As John Geddes reports in this week’s issue of Maclean’s, the RCMP was ready, last fall, to hold a joint press conference with the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS “to declare their agreement that research shows the ‘benefits’ and ‘positive impacts’ of supervised injection sites for intravenous drug users.” It’s a fascinating read.

 

The money paragraph quotes an e-mail from Chief Superintendent Bob Harriman, a senior drug enforcement officer, in which he proposed wording for a joint press release:

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By: John Geddes, Macleans

 

It would have been quite a news conference, and it very nearly happened. Last fall, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, after months of intense, private talks, agreed to face the media together to declare their agreement that research shows the “benefits” and “positive impacts” of supervised injection sites for intravenous drug users.

 

For the RCMP, making such a statement would have been a turning point: the Mounties would have had to distance themselves from dubious studies, commissioned by the force itself, that were critical of Insite, Vancouver’s pioneering safe injection facility. And that would have been a politically awkward move for the federal police, since Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is firmly committed to shutting down Insite.

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An expansion in the numbers of people with HIV in the Canadian province of British Columbia diagnosed and on treatment has started to produce modest reductions in HIV diagnoses and in the average viral load in the community, the 17^th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) heard today.

The trends seen were similar to those reported from San Francisco in a similar presentation the previous day – see this report.

In 2008 the health minister for British Columbia announced that the province would pursue an aggressive ‘test and treat’ strategy in order to reap the public health benefit of reducing the average viral load in people with HIV.

However Dr Julio Montaner of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, the prime mover behind this strategy, told the conference that the ‘second wave’ of increased HAART (highly active antiretroviral treatment) coverage actually started prior to the adoption of this strategy, which in itself does not appear to have further increased access.

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