VANDU

Every year a university somewhere on the west coast hosts a large international health conference. This year it was at Simon Frasier University in Canada, this weekend. Apparently they either didn’t check the US calendar or didn’t want any americans to come since they decided to have it on Memorial Day weekend.  Last year there were over a thousand people at the conference at UW in Seattle and this year there were less than 300. This is not to say the quality of the speakers or presentations were less, but certainly much less inspired. Perhaps some of the participants got lost in dark woods that surround Simon Frasier or the confusing roads that always go in a circle no matter where you are. It was worse than finding your way around Evergreen State College which is clearly a better experience when you’re high. But it was worth the 1 of 3 days I actually attended and I am beginning to understand the beast that is conference planning and have definitely excluded that from possible careers for Jesse. That still leaves…well everything else.

But I didn’t want to just write a complaint, instead I want to highlight one issue that I had known about but became increasingly aware of at one of the seminars during the conference. Through the poetry of Bud Osborne and the activism of church communities and friends, the lower east side of Vancouver BC has brought the burdens and inequities of disease and poverty to our own backyards. The East Hastings district currently has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates IN THE WORLD reaching as high as 30-40%. The only other place you see this rate of infection is in Sub-Saharan Africa in regions of Zimbabwe, Western Kenya, and South Africa. Less than an hour from my home AIDS in what painfully resembles a leaper colony, is ravaging the native populations of that region. And if you are thinking well…they must receive treatment and must be able to live somewhat healthy lives. In East Hastings you are technically considered a senior citizen when you are 47. Life expectancy rates are between 10-15 years less than other non-native Canadians.

Two of the three presenters were academics showing graphs and numbers that merely provided quantitative evidence for what the third group of presenters proclaimed from first hand experience. This third group was from an organization called Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users(VANDU). This organization sets up (legally or not) safe needle exchange and injections sites for the thousands of injection drug users in East Hastings. Richard Utendale who is now the director of VANDU and works on many other projects is a recovering drug addict and has lived on the lower east side for over a decade.

There is certainly a difference between the AIDS epidemic in Vancouver and the one in Sub-Saharan Africa. The main mode of transmission is needle sharing instead of heterosexual sex. The populations impacted the most are minorities instead of…everyone. Yet we see the same causal relationships that determine likelihood of contraction. Non-white, poor, uneducated, and homeless. The most extreme factors being the first and the last. I could go into why, but I think we all can do the math.

So if you think AIDS is far away, think again. www.VANDU.org