World AIDS Day 2021

On the occasion of World AIDS Day, UNAIDS is highlighting the inequalities at the heart of the AIDS pandemic and other pandemics around the world.

In this sense, this year’s proposed theme is: End inequalities. End AIDS. End the pandemic.

The COVID-19 epidemic in Quebec, as in other parts of the world, highlighted the importance of keeping them at the heart of social inequalities in health and concerns of government and public health officials.

These two years are a reminder of the challenges that actors working in the fight against AIDS have faced for 40 years. Elderly people living with HIV are seeing this: the current global pandemic is bringing back previously thought inequalities such as social insecurity, mental health issues, immigration status, gender identities, social health and social coverage, prosecution and stigma. .

As health services’ greater focus on responding to COVID-19, HIV communities have not been left out: the vulnerabilities and strengths of HIV-affected communities have been challenged, both collectively and individually, by screening services, reducing vulnerability or even minimizing or disappearing psychosocial support services. The effects of these disturbances are considered long-term and may further prolong the required catch-up.

By focusing on the fight against inequalities in its global strategy to eradicate HIV and AIDS by 2030, the United Nations program on HIV / AIDS seeks to focus on these uprisings and respond to them as one of the key ones. To success.

In the Framework for Reflecting on the Moral Issues of the COVID-19 Epidemic (2020), the Public Health Ethics Committee made a vague reminder:

“Reflections should be made on the ethical dimensions of services that should be temporarily set aside and restarted as the situation develops.”

He added:

“The promotion of social justice will improve the expected benefit of the proposed public health measures aimed at reducing social inequalities in health.”

The imminent publication of the report of the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec’s HIV Surveillance Program for the year 2020 will allow us to gauge some of the efforts that are collectively awaiting us to end this aspiration in one day. AIDS ..