Thank you.
Good morning and thank you to the chair and members of the committee for inviting us to share our expertise on HIV transmission and public health. We hope that our comments this morning will help your deliberations on this very important issue.
My name is Andrew Brett. I am the Director of Communications at CATIE. Here with me today is Sean Hosein, who co-founded the organization in 1990 and remains to this day our science and medicine editor.
We are Canada's voice for HIV and hepatitis C information. We are funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada to act as the pan-Canadian knowledge broker for people and organizations working in HIV and hepatitis C prevention, testing, treatment and care. We pride ourselves on being a reliable source of accurate and unbiased information about HIV and hepatitis C.
We're appearing here today thanks to your invitation, but also because we believe this is an area of Canadian criminal law that is unfortunately suffering from a poor and outdated understanding of HIV science. Our comments today will be limited to our area of expertise, which is the science of HIV prevention and treatment.
For other matters, such as the most appropriate legal mechanism to curb the inappropriate use of criminal law in matters of HIV non-disclosure, we would defer to others with more expertise in the criminal law, such as the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network.