World AIDS Day aims for zero
Posted Dec 1, 2014 6:47 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The battle is still far from won.
Monday is World AIDS Day, which aims to both raise awareness, and help end the terrible and deadly disease.
The theme for this year is ‘Getting to Zero’: zero discrimination, zero new infections, and zero AIDS-related deaths.
Dr. John Gill, who works at the Southern Alberta HIV Clinic, tells City News, new treatments in just the past few years have extended the life expectancy for a young Canadian with HIV to their early 70’s.
“At the moment we have 27 licensed drugs in Canada. If we put 3 different classes together we can achieve wonderful success. In fact, in our program here, like all of our programs globally, 87 per cent of our patients on treatment are doing really well,” he said.
However, Dr. Gill says progress in developing a vaccine for the disease is very slow.
