Thank you, Chair.
As I mentioned in the last meeting, this study on HIV is extremely important. I'm hoping we can move forward with it as soon as possible. As mentioned, we need to make sure that the members around this table commit to a PrescribeIT investigation before the summer.
I don't think I even need to tell anyone around this table, or the public who are watching, about the importance of this study in Canada right now and throughout the world. In Canada, that's what the focus is going to be on, because it obviously needs attention right now, similar to our motion for Ebola. That was boots on the ground...and something we needed to look at as soon as possible, but that was turned down by the Liberals at this table.
Moving on with this HIV study would be extremely important, because we all know that years ago, when HIV and AIDS were first diagnosed and hit our world, it was horrible. It was a horrible, terrible time for all of us.
I was living in Los Angeles at the time. As you know, in the eighties, it was one of the ground zeros for AIDS and HIV. Quite a few people I knew contracted AIDS at the time, and also people I didn't know, but there was so little known about it that people were dying right and left. I'm sure many people around this table know some people who have died of this. It was an agonizing death at the time. Obviously we have medication now that helps prolong life, which is a miracle and can be credited to the research that was done by scientists at the time and continues to be done.
I have family members who contracted it, unfortunately. I also have a family member who died not of AIDS, but had AIDS. Years of having the disease affected his mental health and he committed suicide. It was devastating to our family.
On hearing that this is raising its ugly head again, there's no way that we shouldn't be able to do this research, especially through the summer, at this committee.
One thing that's interesting is that if you go online, as mentioned by my colleague, you see that hundreds of research projects and scientific studies have been done on AIDS and HIV—even some just recently—so we have to make sure that we don't waste any time with it. When we pass this eventually, of course, we will need to do this research. We need to make sure that we bring in the latest findings. A lot of research has been done that's sitting on shelves, collecting dust. This needs to be current.
If you look at the studies, as my colleague Mr. Bailey mentioned, a large percentage of AIDS patients right now and people with AIDS and HIV have been using meth and fentanyl, because drug addiction has become rampant and out of control in the last decade. I'm sure there's out-of-control drug use.... Every person sitting around this table sees drug addicts walking around their cities and towns every day. It's something we never used to see before. Parents are going to playgrounds with their children and making sure they do a sweep for needles before the kids can even use the playground, which is something we never had to do even five years ago. We know that those needles may have diseases and may have been used by somebody with HIV/AIDS.
The study we do here has to focus on that. I'd like that to include research in rural towns, as I mentioned the last time I spoke. It needs to be done in rural communities like my own.
Also, as I mentioned before, Similkameen—South Okanagan—West Kootenay has one of the highest senior populations. As I mentioned in the study I quoted on Tuesday, it's really hard to tell if somebody has HIV in an older population, especially if that person doesn't have a family doctor, as thousands of people in my riding and throughout Canada don't, so they cannot be diagnosed properly. Even when someone has a family doctor, if they haven't seen these types of symptoms before, they may get it wrong. That will need to be part of this study.
A couple of studies have been done recently, in 2025, in Canada. We may want to get one of those scientists in here to speak about this. One is a 2025 study by Hopwood-Raja, Tseng and Sheehan called “CHANGE-Rx: frailty, falls, polypharmacy, and inappropriate medication use”. The other is a 2025 study by Collins, Cunningham and Vaughan called “Promoting Healthy Aging in People With HIV-Into a New Era”.
There are studies coming out on, in particular, HIV and the aging process. These studies explore links between frailty, falling and excess medications in people with HIV. One report says:
As people with HIV age, their burden of non-HIV medications can increase.
Researchers found that more than 50% of older adults with HIV take at least five non-HIV drugs.
Taking five or more non-HIV medications was associated with an increased risk of frailty and falls.
That is not only difficult for the person with HIV. It's also an incredible burden on our already burdened health system and over-committed hospitals.
Thanks to HIV treatment (antiretroviral therapy, ART) many people with HIV are living long, healthy lives. The impact of ART is so profound that researchers increasingly project that many ART users will live well into their senior years.
As ART users age, the risk for comorbidities increases, just as it does for people without HIV. Older people in general tend to have health issues such as high blood pressure, high levels of bad cholesterol (LDL-C), and so on. As they age, people with HIV are being prescribed more medicines to manage these comorbidities.
Researchers have found that older people without HIV are taking multiple prescribed medicines for comorbidities—this is called polypharmacy. Studies have found that although multiple medications may be necessary for some people, in other people the prescriptions may be excessive and may increase the risk of problems such as falls.
Of course, this becomes even more prevalent when the prescriber may not even know that the person has AIDS.
A team of researchers involved in a study called CHANGE-HIV analyzed health-related information collected from 440 older people...with HIV at seven major Canadian clinics.
They were aged 69 years or older. Ninety-two per cent were male at birth, and 8% were female. The major ethno-racial groups were white at 76% and Black at 13%. They had all been diagnosed with HIV for at least 26 years.
The report continues:
In reviewing the data, researchers made the following findings about all participants:
16% were frail.
21% had experienced a fall in the past six months.
54% had polypharmacy (taking five or more non-HIV medicines)....
nearly 50% had what the researchers called “potentially inappropriate medications”.
the most common comorbidities were abnormal lipid levels...high blood pressure...and cancer....
As mentioned earlier, doctors prescribe medicines to manage comorbidities. Apart from their intended effects, some medicines can have side effects. Specifically, the researchers assessed participants’ non-HIV medicines to find out if they had an inhibiting effect on the neurotransmitter acetylcholine....
I'm sorry if I pronounced it wrong. Was that okay?