Toronto, Canada continue to lag in terms of a comprehensive AIDS strategy

For many, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s, when the deaths of big-name stars like Freddy Mercury, Rock Hudson and Liberace made the disease a front-page epidemic.

Since then, fewer stars have contracted and died from the disease, and Magic Johnson is living proof that contracting it isn’t an automatic death sentence.

So for most of the unaffected, the disease has become one less thing to worry about.

But unfortunately, the epidemic has continued to spread at a frightening pace, and not just worlds away.

According to Ontario’s Ministry of Health, the number of people living with HIV/AIDS in Ontario jumped 67 per cent over 10 years, from 15,904 in 1999 to 26,627 in 2008.

And according to CATIE, 23 per cent of Toronto’s gay men are HIV-positive. That’s highest among all of Canada’s major cities, and comparable with Cape Town, South Africa, a country with one of the highest infection rates in the world.

The proportion of new HIV infections in gay men is 52% in Ontario. Fifty-six per cent of all HIV cases in Ontario are gay men. And approximately 20 per cent of HIV infections attributed to sex between men remain undiagnosed.

Those are staggering figures, and they are right in our back yards. These are people that we chat with at shops and markets, people we meet at parties and people we share space with on the subway. They are not faceless people in Africa and Asia we can turn away from on television.

Canada does not have a national strategy on testing for HIV. Nor we do not have a national pharmacare plan, so access to treatment is inconsistent among cities, towns and provinces. Canada’s HIV strategy is now 10 years old, and outdated in terms of aggressive testing, early detection treatments and long-term care.

Canada needs to be more proactive in combating and treating HIV and AIDS, because it is continuing to spread in our cities and our communities.

It doesn’t have to be front-page news to act.