Certainly.
Madam Chair, I've been involved in HIV research since pretty much the beginnings of the HIV pandemic. I was working in Kenya when it became apparent that there was a huge problem with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. Much of our work in the early days described the emergence of the HIV pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
I worked in Kenya from 1984 until I took the job as the scientific director of the National Microbiology Lab in 2000. The work we did has produced seminal results that have changed global policy related to HIV prevention. For instance, we described the importance of commercial sex in fuelling the epidemic and described how you can intervene to prevent that. That strategy's now being used around the world and has resulted in tremendous declines in the HIV burden in India, Vietnam, Thailand, and other places.
We described the role of male circumcision in reducing the risk of men becoming infected with HIV. That's now global policy being used to prevent HIV transmission. We described the role of breastfeeding in transmitting HIV between mothers and their newborn children. That resulted in a change in policy at the global level.
More recently, we've described a group of individuals, female sex workers, who appear to be immune to HIV, and this has helped to inform HIV vaccine research. We're now in the process of putting together a global consortium of individuals who've been exposed to HIV but didn't get infected, to try to understand natural immunity. That work is being supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
I have a tremendous interest in this Canadian HIV vaccine initiative. Although I'm disappointed in the turn this has taken and the controversy around it, I'm excited about the opportunity to have additional investments in basic research on HIV.