Letter to The Guelph Mercury Newspaper - July/2010

I thoroughly enjoy watching the children in my practice grow. After the Pre-school Well Child Check, most kids don’t make their way back into my exam room for a physical exam until around age 14 or 15. I am excited as I open the door and wonder what miracle of metamorphosis will be sitting on my exam table. The change is often so complete that had I met these gangly adolescents on the street, I would not recognize them. I delivered most of these kids. I have joked with them over the years promising that once they are taller than me, they would have to look for a new family doctor. They all grow taller and of course, I never follow through on that promise.

This week, Vienna is hosting the World AIDS Conference, the largest AIDS conference in the world. New research presented is making headlines around the globe boasting new hope to halt the spread of HIV. Treatment with relatively simple regimens not only restores health to those infected with HIV but also decreases transmission rates. I know this to be true. It is a miracle I have been watching unfold for over 20 years now. I am lucky enough to be immersed in the tremendous reality of this miracle every week as I care for patients with HIV at the Masai Centre in Guelph. I started seeing patients with this disease in 1987 and spent the early part of the 90’s helping young people die a horrific death. I was on maternity leave with my third child when the XI International AIDS Society Conference held in Vancouver in 1996 announced the new drug cocktails that were restoring life to those dying of HIV. Aptly named the ‘Lazarus Effect’, I watched as my own patients returned after one month on these complicated regimens, unrecognizable to me, restored to youthful vitality, no longer barely clinging to life. Miracles make you cry. I cry often.

Treating HIV in the early years with these new medications was a constant challenge, balancing side effects and complications with resistance and treatment failures. Trying to introduce these drugs into the third world where millions are dying of the disease, mostly women and children, was almost impossible, a massive undertaking that has only just begun. Now with advancements in research and technology, treating HIV in North America, a task that was once so difficult, has now been revolutionized.

I tell my patients to expect to live to a normal life expectancy. I counsel couples as to how to conceive safely. I examine newborns that enter into the world without HIV, their mother’s healthy, the miracles mounting by the minute and for the first time last week, I examined a teenage boy infected with the virus at birth, who, since his last visit, has grown three inches. He is now taller than me. A triumph. The tears flow.

Every year, despite the HIV treating world’s efforts, 2.3 million children under the age of 15 are infected with HIV. Fifty percent of children born with HIV in the developing world will die before their second birthday and more than half a million children die of AIDS each year. None of them have any chance of reaching my short stature. The medications are here. They restore life. They decrease the risk of transmission of this virus. They could end the AIDS pandemic…… but the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor and the glaring inequalities and injustices that deprive the weak and marginalized in our world of the most basic of human rights will keep that miracle at bay, at least for a time.

Can you imagine the bright light that would shine in this seemingly darkened world, if we insisted that everyone on the planet with HIV received treatment? What if we engaged in efforts that saw to it that this miracle happened? It is said that one of the conditions for a miracle is difficulty and that the condition for a great miracle is impossibility. I believe that God is big, nothing is impossible and that the conditions for a global miracle are at hand.

You can be part of this international effort that will transform the lives of millions. Join me as I support Bill C-393 and encourage our government to get essential medicines to ailing children in the developing world. Log on to braceletofhope.ca for more information about the Bill. While there, consider buying and wearing a Bracelet of Hope or donating monthly as our campaign reaches out to over 100,000 AIDS orphans in Lesotho.

Take part and take action as we strive to see the end of AIDS.

Dr. Anne-Marie Zajdlik MD CCFP
Founder of the Masai Centre for Local,
Regional and Global Health and
The Bracelet of Hope Campaign.