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, through a democratic process, I was elected president of the International AIDS Society, which is the largest body that brings together health professionals in the field of HIV and AIDS.
I'm coming in front of you today not really to talk about the results of our research, which I believe has been clearly and emphatically demonstrated to you earlier today by my colleague Dr. Thomas Kerr. He is abundantly familiar with the research evidence, the cost-benefit of this intervention, which has been alluded to by the previous speaker in quite clear terms. I would like to give you a sense of why we are investing in this kind of research, this kind of program, and where this fits in the continuum of our struggle and fight against HIV and AIDS in this country and at the international level.
Our group has been fighting HIV and AIDS through research. I should mention that our group has collected a total of over 350 peer- reviewed publications on various aspects of HIV and AIDS and over 150 in the field of HIV and drug addiction.
We had made some substantial progress fighting HIV by the mid-1990s. In 1996, we were instrumental in the discovery and distribution of the so-called modern HIV treatment, a highly active antiretroviral therapy. It goes by the acronym of HAART. HAART, the so-called cocktail, changed the lives of people affected with HIV in that it basically turned the disease into a chronic, manageable disease. It not only allowed us to control and prevent HIV from becoming AIDS, but also, as we have published recently, it prevented transmission of HIV from infected individuals to their partners or to those involved in close relationships with them.
In 1996, in view of this overwhelming evidence, already we felt there was a moral imperative to do something to expand the benefit of antiretroviral therapy to those who needed it but had difficulty accessing the programs. Working together with my colleague Michael O’Shaughnessy, we had previously identified a new upswing in HIV infections emerging from the downtown eastside in Vancouver. For that reason, working with other members of the B.C. centre, we put together a number of studies, including the Vancouver intravenous drug usage study, a cohort that taught us a great deal regarding the needs of individuals living in that very impoverished area of our city.
As a result of that research, we became critically aware that something needed to be done to facilitate entry into the health care system of this very marginalized group of individuals. We were similarly concerned that the status quo, business as usual, was not acceptable in view of the fact that the rates of acquisition of hepatitis C, HIV, and other infectious diseases, including subcutaneous infections and heart disease, were going up and we could not find any way to stop it. Suffice it to say that the rates of hepatitis C surpassed 90% in this population, with HIV rates in excess of 30% in some subgroups. This is as high as you have seen in the worst affected areas of the world, Botswana and the like.
For this reason, we felt compelled to mobilize our resources to try to do something to bring some form of order and health care to these people's lives, assuming they wished to avail themselves of this proposition.
Needle exchanges, and later on the supervised injection site, emerged out of this. The evidence is quite clear. Through engagement in the supervised injection site, through the good work of Vancouver Coastal Health and the Portland Hotel Society, these addicts have now been able to engage in appropriate health care in increasing numbers. In some instances, they have been able to reduce their consumption. They have been able to better manage episodes of overdose, decrease hospital admissions, and so on--