Help Fight HIV — Share the Pledge, Take the Test on World AIDS Day

published on December 1, 2011

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS’ Social Media Campaign Calls on Young Adults to ‘Share the Pledge, Take the Test’ to Prevent HIV/AIDS

Vancouver, British Columbia (December 1, 2011) —To mark the 23rd annual World AIDS Day on December 1st, the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE), a program at St. Paul’s Hospital, is launching a campaign to encourage sexually active young British Columbians to get tested for HIV.

The BC-CfE is aiming its Treatment as Prevention social media campaign at the province’s young adults by launching an interactive website, www.treatmentasprevention.ca, where visitors can pledge to take the HIV test and share their pledge with friends through Facebook and Twitter. The campaign calls for people to ‘Share the Pledge, Take the Test.’

While sharing the pledge is social, testing is entirely voluntary and confidential. Counselling is available before and after the testing and, for those B.C. residents found to be HIV-positive, and medically eligible, they can be assured of receiving treatment at no cost.

“The Treatment as Prevention campaign is about creating a social movement to stop the spread of HIV,” said Dr. Julio Montaner, Director, BC-CfE. “We want to engage people in a dialogue about HIV/AIDS, to provide a venue for them to share their experiences, share their pledge, and normalize testing. Testing for HIV is a critical first step to help people stay healthy and prevent further infections in our community and in the process, help defeat HIV and AIDS.”

Approximately 2,500 people in British Columbia have HIV and are not aware of their status. The Treatment as Prevention campaign aims to access these people through widespread testing and implementation of the Treatment as Prevention strategy.

“This campaign can help show that it is possible to defeat HIV and AIDS using Treatment as Prevention as a cornerstone strategy,” said Stephen Lewis, founder of the Stephen Lewis Foundation (SLF), which provides care and support to people living with HIV and AIDS in Africa. “Over the past two decades, British Columbia has led the way in HIV and AIDS research and care. The eyes of the world will again be on B.C. as it moves to normalize HIV testing and make it the mainstream medical intervention it should be.”

Treatment under the Treatment as Prevention strategy involves administering anti-HIV drugs known as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART). The benefits of HAART treatment are twofold: it reduces the level of HIV in the blood to undetectable levels, improving the health of people with HIV, while also decreasing the level of HIV in sexual fluids to undetectable levels, reducing the likelihood of HIV transmission by more than 95 per cent.

Implementation of the Treatment as Prevention strategy, which was pioneered by the BC-CfE, has dramatically reduced AIDS deaths and new HIV diagnoses in B.C. A total of 301 new HIV diagnoses were made in 2010, a reduction of nearly 65% from the 850 cases diagnosed annually prior to 1996. B.C. is the only province in Canada demonstrating a consistent, steady decline in new HIV diagnoses. In addition to the impact on the individual, their friends and their families, each new HIV case has a lifelong therapeutic cost (medication only) of about $500,000.

Although ‘Share the Pledge, Take the Test’ addresses young adults, it’s important to keep in mind that everyone who’s ever had sex should be tested for HIV.

To take the pledge, share your experience (if you want to), complete the ‘Fact or Fiction’ quiz, and find HIV testing centres near you, visit the new website
Updates on the Treatment as Prevention campaign can be followed on Twitter and #TasP.
To join the Treatment as Prevention conversation, visit the Treatment as Prevention Facebook fan page
Vancouver Coastal Health and Providence Health Care have also recently launched a complementary social marketing campaign called “It’s Different Now” to promote routine HIV testing to people outside of traditional at risk groups. More information on the campaign can be found here.

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About the BC-CfE

The BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, a program at St. Paul’s Hospital, is dedicated to improving the health of British Columbians with HIV through the development, ongoing monitoring and dissemination of comprehensive research and treatment programs for HIV and related diseases. The BC-CfE is a key provincial resource, serving all health authorities, regions, and citizens of B.C.

The BC-CfE places the disease under the microscope, provides care and treatment to those infected, educates doctors and healthcare professionals throughout the province, and promotes evidence-based social policy that helps protect people from acquiring the virus.

About Treatment as Prevention

Treatment as Prevention is a strategy pioneered by Dr. Julio Montaner and his team at the BC-CfE. The strategy involves early administration of anti-HIV drugs known as Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART). HAART interferes with HIV’s ability to replicate and keeps the HIV virus at very low levels in the body. To an HIV-positive person, this has two life-changing implications:

1) HIV infection has been transformed from a death sentence to a chronic, manageable condition; and

2) Individuals receiving effective treatment are extremely unlikely to transmit HIV to another person.

Today, we are seeing HIV-positive persons living long, active lives and enjoying healthy sexual relationships – developments that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.

Since an outright cure remains elusive, the BC-CfE’s goal is to act now and stop further transmission of HIV by providing all HIV-positive persons who are medically eligible with access to HAART treatment. By expanding access to HIV treatment in British Columbia, the BC-CfE is averting new HIV infections in the province. If applied worldwide, this strategy has the potential to dramatically reduce HIV prevalence and pave the way for the eradication of HIV/AIDS.

While British Columbia is the first jurisdiction in the world to implement Treatment as Prevention, others are beginning to model their own HIV strategies on the made-in-BC model. In the U.S., Washington DC, New York and San Francisco have adopted similar strategies. In February 2011, China became the first country in the world to base its national HIV strategy on Treatment as Prevention. Many of the world’s leading healthcare organizations – including UNAIDS, the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. – have also endorsed Treatment as Prevention. In fact, UNAIDS recently identified the concept as a key strategy to halt the spread of HIV worldwide, and has made it the cornerstone of its Treatment 2.0 model.

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

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Help Fight HIV — Share the Pledge, Take the Test on World AIDS Day

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