Adrian Dix, Minister of Health, has issued the following statement in recognition of World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, 2021:
“Today, on World AIDS Day, and during Indigenous AIDS Awareness Week, we show our solidarity with people living with HIV and AIDS here in British Columbia. We mourn those we have lost and we celebrate their lives. We also renew our commitment to supporting those who live with HIV, and to ending this epidemic and the stigma that surrounds it.
“British Columbia has done much to establish itself as a global leader in addressing HIV and AIDS, thanks to the BC Centre for Excellence’s (BC-CfE’s) Treatment as Prevention Strategy (TasP), health authority partners, community-based organizations and people living with HIV working on the front lines. Working together we have made many gains, but there is still more work to be done.
“This year’s World AIDS Day theme is End Inequalities. End AIDS. End Pandemics. Effectively addressing HIV requires that we acknowledge and address the inequalities that drive this epidemic, as well as the other public-health emergencies that we face, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the overdose crisis. This includes recognizing and confronting the racism, stigma and other structural barriers that prevent people from getting the health care and other supports they need, including housing and food security.
“This year, as we mark World AIDS Day and Indigenous AIDS Awareness Week, we acknowledge the efforts of AIDS service and other community-based organizations throughout the province, large and small, that have worked to connect people to testing, treatment, prevention and support.
“Our province has led the way in making HIV treatment available through TasP and, in turn, B.C.’s community-based organizations play an essential role in supporting people to get tested, and to linking them to care, treatment and prevention. B.C. continues to provide fully subsidized antiretroviral therapy to all B.C. residents living with HIV. Today, the treatment program reaches more than 7,500 eligible individuals in all areas of the province.
“In addition, since January 2018, B.C. offers fully subsidized pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) to individuals at risk of HIV infection. To date, more than 8,000 eligible people have enrolled in the program, under the supervision of over 1,400 prescribers, including 47 BC-CfE qualified nurse practitioners. Together, the treatment and PrEP programs represent the cornerstone of the treatment as prevention strategy pioneered by the BC-CfE and now adopted around the world.
“For over three decades, people living with HIV and the organizations that support them have continually adapted community-based approaches to address the epidemic.
“One such organization is Positive Living North No Kheyoh t’sih’en t’sehena Society (PLN), providing culturally appropriate, non-judgmental care and advocacy to people living with HIV/AIDS and those at risk across northern B.C. In Prince George, Smithers, Fort St. John and Dawson Creek, PLN works with some of the most vulnerable members of these communities; people who, in addition to their HIV diagnosis, are often dealing with addiction, homelessness, poverty and the intergenerational impacts of colonization and the residential schools system.
“PLN recognizes that HIV continues to be an issue here in their communities, particularly for their Indigenous clients. Many of the people they help are also unsheltered, at risk of overdose, or dealing with other complex mental-health or substance-use issues.
“PLN works to meet people where they are, and their work is firmly grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and doing, which puts culture and relationships at the centre of their work. This approach has led to their successes in both their prevention and support programs.
“As British Columbia continues to see a decrease in new HIV infections and an increase in the number of people on treatment, and as we work towards its goal of eliminating AIDS, we must also continue to work together to ensure that all people can access culturally safe and stigma-free services.
“On this important day we also celebrate the leadership B.C. has brought to the global fight against HIV/AIDS. Earlier this year, at the urging of United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the UN General Assembly adopted the BC-CfE proposed, TasP inspired, UN 95-95-95 target by 2025 as the roadmap to ‘End HIV/AIDS as a pandemic by 2030,’ defined as decreasing AIDS-related mortality and new HIV infections globally by 90%, using 2010 as the baseline.
“The new target calls for at least 95% of people living with HIV (PLHIV) to be diagnosed, at least 95% of those diagnosed to be on antiretroviral treatment (ART) and at least 95% of those on ART to have undetectable HIV levels by the end of 2025.
“Ending AIDS as an epidemic by 2030 remains within reach. However, as Dr. Julio Montaner, BC-CfE’s executive director and physician in chief recognizes, the challenge remains to ensure we secure the international leadership’s sustained commitment to deliver on the promise of BC- CfE’s treatment as prevention strategy globally.
“World AIDS Day highlights the work still to do and together, we can find the answer in the fight against HIV/AIDS.”
Quick Facts:
There are an estimated 9,800 British Columbians living with HIV.
The Province’s STOP HIV/AIDS project, which includes the successful Treatment as Prevention Program developed by the BC Centre for Excellence (BC-CfE), as well as the work of health authority partners and community-based organizations, receives approximately $20 million in annual funding.
The Province also funds the BC-CfE’s HIV Drug Treatment Program, which includes publicly funded HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system.
While HIV is a manageable chronic condition, if left untreated, it can cause a weakened immune system or acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).
PAN is a network that includes PLN and more than 40 other community-based organizations addressing HIV, hepatitis C and harm reduction across BC, visit: https://pacificaidsnetwork.org/
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.
There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.
The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.
Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.
Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.
Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.
“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.
But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.
That includes his own teenage daughter.
“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.
It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.
“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.
New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.
“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.
Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.
It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.
Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.
Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.
The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.
The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Patients who are older, don’t speak English, and don’t have a high school education are more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay in Canada, according to new research.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information measured preventableharmful events from 2023 to 2024, such as bed sores and medication errors,experienced by patients who received acute care in hospital.
The research published Thursday shows patients who don’t speak English or French are 30 per cent more likely to experience harm. Patients without a high school education are 20 per cent more likely to endure harm compared to those with higher education levels.
The report also found that patients 85 and older are five times more likely to experience harm during a hospital stay compared to those under 20.
“The goal of this report is to get folks thinking about equity as being a key dimension of the patient safety effort within a hospital,” says Dana Riley, an author of the report and a program lead on CIHI’s population health team.
When a health-care provider and a patient don’t speak the same language, that can result in the administration of a wrong test or procedure, research shows. Similarly, Riley says a lower level of education is associated with a lower level of health literacy, which can result in increased vulnerability to communication errors.
“It’s fairly costly to the patient and it’s costly to the system,” says Riley, noting the average hospital stay for a patient who experiences harm is four times more expensive than the cost of a hospital stay without a harmful event – $42,558 compared to $9,072.
“I think there are a variety of different reasons why we might start to think about patient safety, think about equity, as key interconnected dimensions of health-care quality,” says Riley.
The analysis doesn’t include data on racialized patients because Riley says pan-Canadian data was not available for their research. Data from Quebec and some mental health patients was also excluded due to differences in data collection.
Efforts to reduce patient injuries at one Ontario hospital network appears to have resulted in less harm. Patient falls at Mackenzie Health causing injury are down 40 per cent, pressure injuries have decreased 51 per cent, and central line-associated bloodstream infections, such as IV therapy, have been reduced 34 per cent.
The hospital created a “zero harm” plan in 2019 to reduce errors after a hospital survey revealed low safety scores. They integrated principles used in aviation and nuclear industries, which prioritize safety in complex high-risk environments.
“The premise is first driven by a cultural shift where people feel comfortable actually calling out these events,” says Mackenzie Health President and Chief Executive Officer Altaf Stationwala.
They introduced harm reduction training and daily meetings to discuss risks in the hospital. Mackenzie partnered with virtual interpreters that speak 240 languages and understand medical jargon. Geriatric care nurses serve the nearly 70 per cent of patients over the age of 75, and staff are encouraged to communicate as frequently as possible, and in plain language, says Stationwala.
“What we do in health care is we take control away from patients and families, and what we know is we need to empower patients and families and that ultimately results in better health care.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
Canadian Press health coverage receives support through a partnership with the Canadian Medical Association. CP is solely responsible for this content.
