Health committee  Really, the federal government does have a role to play in trying to engage the provincial governments that have not been as active or engaged in the process. We're quite fortunate in B.C., where the provincial government understood the net benefit to the province of appropriatel

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  Maybe I'll start. What you're describing is a barrier to people getting tested—yes, absolutely. If you create administrative hurdles for people to get tested, not just for the patient but also for the provider, they're not going to do it. In B.C. we developed provincial guidelin

Health committee  It's a different process. You're giving it to people who don't have HIV, so there is nothing to actually measure to see if they're taking it. It was originally licensed and studied as a daily pill that you take every day, to prevent you from getting HIV before you potentially get

Health committee  With respect to HIV, we had the lowest number of new HIV diagnoses in B.C. since the mid 1990s in 2017 and 2018. The rate in 2017 seemed anomalously low. In 2018, it is still a decrease, but not as great as it was in 2017. We think we're generally on the right track, although the

Health committee  Sure. Thanks very much. We do have some data from studies in Vancouver about HIV testing among gbMSM and their reasons for not going for testing. The most recent data we have was collected between 2012 and 2014. In there I think something like 90% of gbMSM living in Greater Vanc

Health committee  Yes. I'm afraid that I don't actually know the overall cost of that, but one thing that's important to note is that one of the issues that makes this affordable now is in terms of the patent on the two drugs that are actually used for PrEP. One of them was already available as a

Health committee  Like antiretrovirals for HIV treatment in British Columbia, all of the medications are purchased centrally through the Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. Then they are distributed to different regions around the province. Typically they can be delivered to specific pharmacies, an

Health committee  Is that directed at any of us?

Health committee  Maybe I'll start. In Canada, the short answer is that we don't yet know. Until quite recently, even among gbMSM, where globally there's a lot of community interest in PrEP, PrEP uptake in Canada has been very low. In most provinces, that was thought to be due to an absence of pub

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. On behalf of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and our Executive Director, Dr. Julio Montaner, I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak today. My name is David Moore. I'm a Research Scientist at the BC-CfE in Vancouver and a