{"id":1004,"date":"2023-01-30T20:22:12","date_gmt":"2023-01-30T20:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackmanifestohiv.ca\/?page_id=1004"},"modified":"2025-08-25T14:48:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T14:48:11","slug":"hiv-and-black-communities-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blackmanifestohiv.com\/staging\/4560\/hiv-and-black-communities-in-canada\/","title":{"rendered":"HIV and Black communities in Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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HIV and Black communities in Canada<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have reproduced this section from the Black HIV Manifesto (revised version)<\/p>\n\n\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/i>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tTracking the HIV epidemic affecting Black Canadians \u2013 a story of neglect<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t
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Black communities are poorly served by the processes and methods that government agencies use to assess, track and communicate trends in diagnoses.<\/p>\r\n

It is well known that Black communities are grossly over-represent in HIV diagnoses; however, the precise magnitude is shrouded by health authorities\u2019 lack of urgency to report on \u201crace\u201d and ethnicity. Since data on HIV influence support for policy and programs, the lack of more precise data allows health authorities to shirk their responsibility to Black Canadians.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

It should be considered a scandal that, even in 2020 two large provinces (BC and Quebec) did not submit to PHAC an ethno-racial breakdown of new HIV cases; in addition, two other provinces (New Brunswick and Saskatchewan) provided data that recognised only First Nation or other (PHAC, 2022). Furthermore, in 2022, neither Manitoba nor Nova Scotia included race and ethnicity in their \u201csurveillance\u201d data submitted to the federal (PHAC 2024).<\/p>\r\n

The outcome of this failure to collect and share data is that, by 2022, \u201crace\u201d or ethnicity was available for less than half of the new HIV cases in PHAC\u2019s \u201csurveillance\u201d report (PHAC 2024). Black communities have no say in how, or what, data about them gets collected or used, or how their data are curated or shared. In short, Canadian governments and public institutions are addicted to colonial practices well into the 21st century, which continue to undermine Black health and wellbeing.<\/p>\r\n

In Ontario, ethno-racial background was missing for one-third of first-time HIV diagnoses in 2022 (OHESI, 2022; 2024). Based on their experience and knowledge, service providers, community advocates and some policy makers believe that Black people may be over-represented among the cases that do not have a confirmed racial or ethnic designation. In other words, it is quite likely that the burden of HIV among Black people in Ontario and Canada may be even more severe than the available data show.<\/p>\r\n

Public health authorities in Canada also release data about Black people without any notable consultation or follow-up with the agencies, researchers and stakeholders who are on the front lines of mobilizing Black communities in response to HIV. This is a serious flaw that hampers the efforts of Black stakeholders to mount an informed community response to HIV.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/i>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe increasing burden of the Canadian epidemic among Black communities up to 2019<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t
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By 2019, the share of new diagnoses among the white population of Canada and Ontario had been falling steadily for the past 10 years at least, principally among white gay, bisexual and other white men who have sex with men (i.e., white gbMSM). But there were no such hopeful signs among the Black population. Instead, year after year Black people accounted for one of every four new cases or diagnoses in Canada as a whole and in Ontario, even though Black people make up just about 5% and 6% of the respective national and provincial population (Haddad et al., 2021; Haddad et al. 2018; OHESI 2021).<\/p>\r\n

Those trends suggest that, by 2019, there were at least two vastly different HIV epidemics in Canada. For example, even though Black people account for roughly 4% of the country\u2019s population, 2019 data show that Black women and men accounted for 42% and 18% of reported cases among all women and men respectively. In comparison, white women and men make up 14% and 38%, respectively, of new diagnoses (Haddad et al. 2021). Overall, as stated above, Black people account for one of every four new diagnoses year after year for Canada, and the trend is similar in Ontario up to 2019 (OHESI, 2021). Added to this, for at lest the two decades ending in 2019, Black Canadians were much more likely to die of AIDS than their white counterparts (Tjepkema et al. 2023).<\/p>\r\n

It is clear to us that the epidemic among Black communities requires a transformative and vastly different approach than the business-as-usual that has benefitted white Canadians.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t