Health committee  The cost per year, if you consider drugs and...[Technical difficulty—Editor]

Health committee  Thank you, Ms. Fry, for your questions and your comments. The cost of the program in British Columbia at the present time is in the order of $120 million per year, considering that we have 14,000 people infected with HIV in the province and we have approximately 7,000 people ac

Health committee  I cannot give you a figure, but it will be manyfold greater than we are currently spending. In other words, the return on the investment is in the order of three to five to one, because really what we're doing is not only stopping people from becoming sick, but we're putting them

Health committee  Thank you, Ms. Davies, for your remarks. Briefly, there are 3,300 new infections in this country per year. We argued that if we were to embrace a “test and treat” approach—the “seek and treat” approach that we're talking about—we could reduce that number in a matter of two to t

Health committee  Let me conclude by saying that if this virus was not HIV, and it was called H1N1, SARS, or something else, we would have a national strategy. We're neglecting it because we're discriminating against HIV.

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Let me first introduce my partner in this presentation, Dr. Thomas Kerr, from the B.C. Centre for Excellence. He's the director of the urban health program here at the centre at St. Paul's Hospital and the University of British Columbia. The theme I woul

Health committee  Yes, I can hear you. Thank you.

Health committee  I can hear you all right.

Health committee  My name is Julio Montaner. I am the director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS in Vancouver. I'm the chair of AIDS research at the University of British Columbia and the director of the HIV program at St. Paul's Hospital Providence Health Care. As of two years ago, th