B.C. doctor worries USAID cuts will lead to 6 million more HIV deaths over 4 years
Dr. Julio Montaner, who is the physician-in-chief for the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, says that he is dumbfounded and devastated by the U.S. administration's decision to cut funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Montaner says the decision will lead to a significant uptick in HIV cases across the globe.
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Cision Canada
3 days ago
- Cision Canada
The BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS national Summit raises alarm about rising incidence of HIV in Canada and threats to global progress
Delegates call on Prime Minister to end the Canadian epidemic and lead the worldwide HIV response in light of dramatic US cuts to treatment and care VANCOUVER, BC, June 6, 2025 /CNW/ - The BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE) is hosting a national Summit of medical and HIV experts to raise the alarm about the rising incidence of HIV in Canada, the immense threat that US cuts to HIV programs pose to millions at risk of disease and death globally, and the need for Canadian leadership to help prevent a resurgence in HIV/AIDS. Despite the groundbreaking work done to implement the BC-CfE's Treatment as Prevention ® (TasP ®) and HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) programs in many jurisdictions, Canada is losing ground to HIV/AIDS across the country. The latest available government statistics for 2023 show a 35% uptick in HIV cases in Canada compared to 2022. Anecdotal discussions between BC-CfE and HIV experts across Canada indicate the situation continues to deteriorate, with HIV incidence statistics expected to be higher yet again in 2024 and in 2025. Meanwhile, the United States has substantially decreased funding to domestic programs currently supported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Medicare, and international programs supported by PEPFAR (the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and USAID. UNAIDS estimates another 6.6 million new HIV infections and 4.2 million AIDS-related deaths between 2025 and 2029 if US government cuts continue. At the National TasP Summit, Dr. Julio Montaner, BC-CfE Executive Director & Physician-in-Chief, called on Prime Minister Mark Carney to take the reins and redouble efforts to end the Canadian HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030, fully fund Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) and PrEP within a national pharmacare plan, and meet the UNAIDS 95-95-95 target for HIV testing, treatment and viral suppression. Meeting the UNAIDS targets * would result in a 90% reduction in HIV/AIDS-related deaths and new infections by 2030, ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a public health threat. "The Prime Minister has called for cost-effective, nation-building projects to improve the lives of Canadians and show leadership," said Dr. Montaner. "Redoubling efforts to defeat HIV/AIDS in Canada by 2030 fits the bill. It saves lives, prevents disease progression, improves quality of life and saves money. We have a plan. We need the Prime Minister's help to get it over the finish line." In addition, Canada must step up to better support the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to provide much-needed international leadership in a renewed and reinvigorated fight against HIV/AIDS. Weakening global efforts for HIV prevention, treatment, and support are already having an impact in British Columbia and throughout Canada. Domestically, HIV prevention and treatment strategies have saved countless lives and dramatically improved the lives of people living with and at-risk of HIV. However, many of Canada's new HIV cases relate to domestic and international migration, demonstrating the need for federal unity in Canada's HIV response and better support for the Global Fund. "HIV does not respect provincial, Canadian or international borders," said Summit co-chair Dr. Val Montessori, BC-CfE Director of Clinical Education. "With new HIV diagnoses rising across Canada, the need is greater than ever to implement proven HIV prevention and treatment strategies. By working together, we can strengthen the national HIV response in Canada and around the world, improve the lives of people living with HIV, and prevent new cases." *About the UNAIDS 95-95-95 Targets Based on the Treatment as Prevention strategy developed by the BC-CfE, the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) set out ambitious targets in 2014 to end the AIDS epidemic globally by 2030. This culminated in the UN 95-95-95 Targets, which established that countries ensure 95% of people living with HIV are diagnosed, 95% of those diagnosed are on treatment, and 95% of those on treatment are virally suppressed, by the year 2025. Meeting the UN Targets would change the trajectory of the epidemic so that we would see a 90% reduction in HIV/AIDS related deaths and new HIV infections by 2030, which would herald the end of the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a public health threat. About the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS The BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE) is Canada's largest HIV/AIDS research, treatment and education facility – nationally and internationally recognized as an innovative world leader in combating HIV/AIDS and related diseases. The made-in-BC Treatment as Prevention ® strategy (TasP ®) pioneered by BC-CfE, and adopted by UNAIDS since 2011, inspired the ambitious global target for HIV treatment – known as the United Nations' 90-90-90 Target by 2020 and current UN 95-95-95 Target by 2025 – to end AIDS as a pandemic by 2030. The BC-CfE is applying TasP ® to therapeutic areas beyond HIV/AIDS, including viral hepatitis and addiction, to promote Targeted Disease Elimination ® as a means to contribute to healthcare sustainability. The BC-CfE works in close collaboration with key stakeholders, including government, health authorities, health care providers, academics, and the community to decrease the health burden of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C and addictions across Canada and around the world.
Winnipeg Free Press
5 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Edmund White, a groundbreaking gay author, dies at 85
NEW YORK (AP) — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room is Empty,' has died. He was 85. White's death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details. Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years. A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. 'A Boy's Own Story' was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature's commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favorites as Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' and Henry Green's 'Nothing.' 'Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,' cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. 'A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.' The age of AIDS, and beyond In early 1982, just as the public was learning about AIDS, White was among the founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, which advocated AIDS prevention and education. The author himself would learn that he was HIV-positive in 1985, and would remember friends afraid to be kissed by him, even on the cheek, and parents who didn't want him to touch their babies. White survived, but watched countless peers and loved ones suffer agonizing deaths. Out of the seven gay men, including White, who formed the influential writing group the Violet Quill, four died of complications from AIDS. As White wrote in his elegiac novel 'The Farewell Symphony,' the story followed a shocking arc: 'Oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties.' But in the 1990s and after he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives. 'We're in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don't need to write exclusively about that,' he said in a Salon interview in 2009. 'Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.' In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honor previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others. 'To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,' White said during his acceptance speech. Childhood yearnings White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer 'who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.' His mother a psychologist 'given to rages or fits of weeping.' Trapped in 'the closed, sniveling, resentful world of childhood,' at times suicidal, White was at the same time a 'fierce little autodidact' who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,' he wrote in the essay 'Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf,' published in 1991. As he wrote in 'A Boy's Own Story,' he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be 'normal.' Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from 'A Boy's Own Story' told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection. 'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?' He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Socially, he met Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as 'Mama Cass' of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for 'A Boy's Own Story' after he caricatured her in the novel 'Caracole.' 'In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd helped me and befriended me,' he later wrote. Early struggles, changing times Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would 'dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars.' A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and 'all hell broke loose.' 'Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,' wrote White, who soon joined the protests. 'Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.' Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. Before the 1970s, few novels about openly gay characters existed beyond Vidal's 'The City and the Pillar' and James Baldwin's 'Giovanni's Room.' Classics such as William Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' had 'rendered gay life as exotic, marginal, even monstrous,' according to White. But the world was changing, and publishing was catching up, releasing fiction by White, Kramer, Andrew Holleran and others. White's debut novel, the surreal and suggestive 'Forgetting Elena,' was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a follow-up to the bestselling 'The Joy of Sex' that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, 'Nocturnes for the King of Naples,' was released and he followed with the nonfiction 'States of Desire,' his attempt to show 'the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren't just hairdressers, they're also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.' With 'A Boy's Own Story,' published in 1982, he began an autobiographical trilogy that continued with 'The Beautiful Room is Empty' and 'The Farewell Symphony,' some of the most sexually direct and explicit fiction to land on literary shelves. Heterosexuals, he wrote in 'The Farewell Symphony,' could 'afford elusiveness.' But gays, 'easily spooked,' could not 'risk feigning rejection.' His other works included 'Skinned Alive: Stories' and the novel 'A Previous Life,' in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published 'City Boy,' a memoir of New York in the 1960s and '70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels 'Jack Holmes & His Friend' and 'Our Young Man' and the memoir 'Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.' 'From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,' he told The Guardian around the time 'Jack Holmes' was released. 'It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.'
Cision Canada
5 days ago
- Cision Canada
Cepheid Receives Health Canada Licence for Xpert® HIV-1 Viral Load XC
Next-Generation Molecular Test for Monitoring Viral Load and HIV-1 Infection SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 4, 2025 /CNW/ -- Cepheid today announced that Health Canada has issued Cepheid a medical device licence for Xpert ® HIV-1 Viral Load XC, a next-generation extended-coverage (XC) test intended to aid in assessing HIV viral load levels, which are used to monitor effectiveness of antiretroviral treatment. Xpert ® HIV-1 Viral Load XC dual target test provides extended strain coverage ensuring a high level of performance with a simple workflow to improve patient access to the standard of care and help achieve UNAIDS HIV targets by 2030. 1 "Xpert ® HIV-1 Viral Load XC leverages dual target technology to improve detection while maintaining the flexibility to be performed on-demand in as little as 90 minutes." said Vitor Rocha, President of Cepheid. "Access to the test can enhance patient care, as measurement of HIV viral load informs treatment plans while fast results enable earlier interventions with counseling and therapy." The test is designed for use on any of Cepheid's GeneXpert ® Systems which provide simple, reference lab quality PCR testing on location in laboratory environments at medical centers and hospitals or in community health clinics and physician offices. Xpert ® HIV-1 Viral Load XC will begin shipping to customers in Canada in June 2025. Visit for more information. Malisa et al 2023 Nature Scientifc Reports | (2023) 13:4578 About Cepheid Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Cepheid is a leading molecular diagnostics company that is an operating company within Danaher Corporation's Diagnostics platform. Cepheid is dedicated to improving healthcare by developing, manufacturing, and marketing accurate yet easy-to-use molecular systems and tests. By automating highly complex and time-consuming manual procedures, the company's solutions deliver a better way for institutions of any size to perform sophisticated genetic testing for organisms and genetic-based diseases. Through its strong molecular biology capabilities, the company is focusing on those applications where accurate, rapid, and actionable test results are needed most, such as managing infectious diseases and cancer. For more information, visit
