Mr. Speaker, yesterday was World AIDS Day, a day to remember the 42 million people who have died from AIDS, to remember our relatives and our friends.
I remember in 1982 as a medical student seeing a poster about a mysterious outbreak of a deadly pneumonia in the gay community of San Francisco. Four years later, we were seeing a lot of cases of AIDS in Toronto. In the late 1980s, when I was working in Swaziland in southern Africa, it went from zero cases of HIV to 26% of pregnant women being HIV positive within a few short years.
AIDS was and is a pandemic. For a long time, HIV/AIDS was absolutely a death sentence. The discovery of antiretrovirals has turned AIDS into a manageable chronic condition.
Although our work is not yet done, making ARVs available to millions of people globally has absolutely been one of the greatest triumphs of the modern era.