Every year, on December 1st, the world commemorates World AIDS Day. It’s an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, to show support for people living with HIV, and remember those who lost their lives to AIDS. Founded in 1988, World AIDS Day was the first ever global health day.
Although the world has made significant progress in recent decades, important global targets for 2020 were not met. This World AIDS Day, UNAIDS and WHO are highlighting the urgent need to end the inequalities that drive AIDS and other pandemics around the world. Forty years since the first AIDS cases were reported, HIV still threatens the world. Today, the world is off track from delivering on the shared commitment to end AIDS by 2030 not because of a lack of knowledge or tools to beat AIDS, but because of structural inequalities that obstruct access to HIV prevention and treatment.
Dr. Allison (Allie) Carter is a Research Fellow with the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, and a Researcher at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, supporting Canada’s largest community-based cohort of women living with HIV. She is also a co-investigator on 10 Canadian Institutes of Health Research studies investigating the social determinants of HIV and sexual health among women in Canada and has published 29 scientific articles. Currently, she is involved in several projects focusing on women living with HIV, young people with disability, migrant communities, and the broader population. In addition to being a researcher, Dr. Carter is also an avid writer and activist, writing about health, gender issues, and sexual rights for The Conversation and Huffington Post and is a co-founder and editor of Life and Love with HIV.
Dr. Angela Kaida is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University and holds the Canada Research Chair Tier II in Global Perspectives in HIV and Sexual and Reproductive Health. As a global health epidemiologist, she has dedicated her career towards addressing inequities in sexual and reproductive health in the context of HIV. Using a rights-based, evidence-informed, and community-driven approach, Dr. Kaida leads innovative HIV prevention studies in local, national, and global settings. Over the past several years, Dr. Kaida, together with UBC PhD Candidate, Kalysha Closson, have been working to address the high burden of HIV prevalence among South African youth. The AYAZAZI study is an interdisciplinary longitudinal cohort study which aims to understand HIV acquisition risk and demand for antiretroviral therapy-driven HIV prevention strategies among adolescents living in Durban and Soweto
Dr. Kate Shannon is a Professor of Medicine at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health, and a Canada Research Chair Tier II in Global Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS. Her research involves investigating the complex social and structural drivers of sexual health and HIV/STI prevention, treatment, and care among women, gender, and sexual minority populations in Canada and globally. Dr. Shannon has published more than 200 peer review publications and over 500 media stories, and has worked for over a decade with TASO (The largest East African Indigenous-Led AIDS Support Organization) on Youth Sexual Health Project with conflict-affected migrant and refugee youth and young women in the Gulu District of Northern Uganda. In 2017, Dr. Shannon was awarded the UBC Faculty of Medicine Distinguished Achievement Award in Applied Research for outstanding contributions to applied research. In the same year, she was awarded the inaugural Excellence in HIV Research Award at the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research / Canada AIDS Research Conference for her leadership in advancing change in HIV movement in Canada and internationally.
