As I write this, I am in the latter stages of my efforts to raise money through participating in Ça Marche, Québec's annual AIDS fundraising walk organized by the Farha Foundation. The walk is Sunday, 30 September, and as usual I am worried about how big the turnout will be and how much money will be raised. 

In the early days of this activity, people turned out in the thousands. Some people living with HIV were so determined to participate that they did so with the help of friends to push their wheelchairs through the streets. I worry that the level of commitment of our society is not there, but I worry more that people living with HIV have lost interest in their own cause. 

We might be the victims of the same scientific advances that have led to our being alive today. I live normally, I have a treatment regimen that doesn't intrude too much on my life and rarely, if ever, does my HIV status enter into the conversation. So are we done with HIV then? Not by a long shot. 

First reason to get out there: prevention. We still have new infections every year, even if the rate of new infections is not explosive everywhere in the country (and in some places it is), it is the slow and steady accumulation of personal tragedies that we can't give up on fighting to end. We can be proud of what community action has done since the beginning of this epidemic to stem the tide of new infections. I would hate to think of where we would be today without that work, and I dream of what we might achieve if that community action were appropriately resourced. 

Need more? Let's talk about those personal tragedies from the first reason. Those of us who are living with HIV and have been for some time may have forgotten what it feels like to get that diagnosis. Despite all the reassuring words from the doctor about having a normal life expectancy, and despite all of the living proof around us that those words are true for so many, the diagnosis is a crushing blow from which most of us need help to recover. Those of us who aren't lucky enough to have a support network of family or friends, or who can't trust that support network to remain in place in the shadow of the fateful diagnosis have community resources to turn to for help and for a pathway to building or rebuilding the support that is so vital to living and thriving. 

Even when things are going well healthwise, we can stumble on the first and last obstacles associated with HIV in our society: the fear and stigma that are attached to HIV and to almost all of the methods of contracting it. These play themselves out in public policy that refuses to do what needs to be done to prevent HIV transmission, in criminal prosecutions for non-disclosure of HIV status, even in the absence of risk of transmission, in lost jobs or denied insurance coverage…and in many other ways too numerous to list here. Those are the front lines of the community action now, defending the rejected and giving them places to be themselves, forcing health officials to act in the best interests of the health of ALL of us. This is work that governments are often reluctant to do (when they are not blatantly hostile) that has to be picked up by the same organizations we founded almost thirty years ago when nobody cared about a bunch of gay men dying of a mysterious disease. 

So yes, I will walk, if only to be counted in the street and to make the unconcerned public sit up and take notice of our cause. I will also give according to my means, because I have seen from the inside of organizations the difference that tangible public support can make when funders of many stripes are getting pickier about the approaches and populations with which they are willing to be associated. 

I hope you will walk, or that you did walk if your AIDS walk has already taken place. I hope you will also give according to your ability to give. 

Ken Monteith is walking in support of the human rights programs of COCQ-SIDA, the Québec coalition of AIDS organizations. If you want to support him, you can do so here. 

Don't get your knickers in a twist just yet: I have absolutely no objections to seeing our community in all of its diversity, from the parents to the drag queens to the leather community to the sports teams, all being as tame or outrageous as they want to be on a day (or a few days) that, for once, is reserved for our free expression. What I really choke on is the increasing tendency of pharmaceutical companies to use these occasions to flog their products to us. 

I totally understand the difficulty for the organizers of these events to find sufficient funding to hold them, especially in the era of a government that wants to fund family-friendly things like the Military Culture Festival and all of the hoopla around the War of 1812. After all, nothing says family-friendly like guns and shooting and all-out war, right? So the organizers might be forgiven for seeking funding from our pharma pals, even though that is a truly unfortunate turn of events, especially against a backdrop of public billboards announcing these same companies' products. 

You see, I am among those people who think that some things, like our health, should not be commercialized. Only two countries in the world permit advertising of prescription medications — New Zealand and (surprise!) the United States — but the rules in Canada have shown themselves to be ineffective in practice, especially in the context of an easily accessible internet. 

What is allowed in Canada? There are two ways that a pharmaceutical company can reach out to the general population: information with respect to a condition, without mention of the name of the company or the name of a product, or corporate advertising without mention of any condition that the company or its products are meant to treat. If there are parallel campaigns (and we have seen these in recent years), they should not allow the viewer to connect them, because that would establish the link between the product and the condition that it is meant to treat. Ads are "pre-approved" by two private agencies acting on behalf of Health Canada, which seems to defer to their judgment (from my experiences of filing complaints in the past). 

I'm going to leave the discussion of pharmaceutical advertising in theory to a very well-written paper by the Canadian Treatment Action Council (CTAC) dating back to the year 1999 and available here. I'm going to focus on my experiences of this phenomenon as a gay man living with HIV in the gayest neighbourhood of Montréal. 

I've seen the advertising of HIV treatments blanketing my neighbourhood for years at an expense too exaggerated for me to imagine and recuperated, most likely, in the price of the product. We are targeted because we are the easiest group of HIV patients to find in large clusters — you can't really find large groups of the other populations heavily affected by HIV circulating in the same spaces, except maybe intravenous drug users, and nobody seems to target them as consumers. So we have seen plenty of ads that purport to give "patient information" (will someone please explain to me how ten words on a billboard with a link to a rather empty website gives me the information I need to make a treatment decision?), others that poke at the undesirable side-effects of their competitors (also very useful "patient information", presented equally completely) and still others that name the product or the company (because it would certainly be impossible for us to check the internet for what condition is meant to be treated, even on our phones standing in front of the billboard). 

The only reason for this advertising is to try to influence the choice of a product or the choice of what we will signal as important to us when we consult our doctors. Is it really my number one priority to reduce the number of pills I take, or am I more concerned about side effects? Maybe I am more complex than being reduced to a single message that can be explained in ten words. 

Last year, a new entry on the pharmaceutical advertising scene, tying itself very clearly to pride: Viagra. I tried to determine the message behind this targeting of the gay community around its pride festivities by a drug approved to address erectile dysfunction and now facing a number of competitors in the field. Are they saluting the aging of out gay men — albeit at half-mast (sorry, I couldn't resist) — with their rainbow background behind their clearly identified pill? How gay are they when they advertise in spaces likely to reach other aging men? Or maybe they are suggesting a use for their product that has not been approved by Health Canada…party drug! Surely we wouldn't allow a producer of a regulated product to try to influence the public to buy their product for a purpose not indicated on the label! And yet there it was, in all its rainbow glory, on every bus shelter, but also (disgustingly for me) as a float in the parade. 

I am very much in favour of empowered patients having access to complete and balanced information about their treatment options, but take a look at the next pharmaceutical ad you see and ask yourself how complete or balanced that information is. It is high time that Health Canada took another look at the regulations applicable to the advertising of prescription medications, updating them to correspond to the realities of today (especially highly mobile internet access). 

So yes, talk to your doctor about all of your treatment options, but also talk to your legislator and ask that person to press for more realistic control over the advertising of restricted health products.

How about a few more Olympic tidbits from my skewed perspective? I have a few notable performances and a big tongue-lashing for our broadcasting pals. Shall we begin? 

First of all, do we really need an evil enemy in order to feel good about ourselves? Every time I turned around, there was talk of those nasty Chinese athletes, who must surely be doing something underhanded — so underhanded in fact that they have discovered undetectable ways of hiding their deceit! How dare a woman swim as fast as the men! She must be doping! Really, if our own athletes had enough support to train as much as theirs and we all spent a little less time pointing fingers, we might be their rivals. 

I did enjoy a couple of performances in the manly man category. Bulgarian Jordan Jovtchev (above), whose name seems to be spelled so many different ways that we'll just call him grandpa gymnast (he's 39), performing on the rings. In his own words, he can no longer compete with the young 'uns on the whole range of apparatuses, but he can certainly hold his own on this impressive one. 

More to the middle of the age scale, 27-year-old Robert Harting (below) of Germany celebrated his gold medal in the discus by tearing his shirt off and the running about 100 metres of hurdles, which was entertaining. Younger still, "fastest man" Jamaican Usain Bolt's signature pose seems to be catching on for everyone! 

On the tragi-comic side of things, South Korean modern pentathlete Woojin Hwang — whose nickname is apparently "careless" — was thrown from the horse in the equestrian part of the competition. Neither was hurt, allowing this to be a bit comic. Better still was the number of penalty points assessed: when your horse knocks down a rail you lose four points; this guy lost 464 points on the buck-off! Perhaps he'll join my previous call to remove the animals from the human sport arena… 

More tragic, but with a special silver lining, is the story of Canadian triathlete Paula Findlay who, having a terrible day, persisted and finished, even if she was last to arrive. For me, she needn't have apologized and I feel terrible that she should feel badly about her performance. She made a remarkable display of finishing what she set out to do in the face of adversity, and that's what the Olympics ought to be about. 

Okay, a last swipe at the broadcaster. It isn't for tape-delayed coverage like in the US on NBC, but for a crime far worse: bad grammar in the theme song! "I believe in the power of you and I" is wrong and grated at my every nerve every time I heard it. If you don't know what's wrong with it, may I suggest a tip from my mother: try separating the sentence to see if it still sounds right. Who does the power belong to? It be longs to you (fine) and it belongs to I (wrong!). They couldn't find anything to rhyme with "me" in that song? I find that hard to believe. 

At least I can take solace in the fact that the CBC has won the rights to the next couple of Olympics. Now if they get it into their head to buy the rights to that song, me will get very angry indeed! ;-)

I'm writing this on the first day of the application of new rules for the (Canadian) Federal Interim Health Program and I am saddened by what has become of this country. "Happy Canada Day! You no longer have health care, refugee claimants!" 

Just to be clear and not to be accused of exaggeration, let me outline my understanding of the changes that have come into force. Some refugee claimants will be entitled to certain kinds of doctor visits, while others will not have those covered (if they come from countries that Canada considers "safe"). The only coverage for medication will be medication to treat a condition that is considered to present a "danger to public health." 

Diabetes, for example, is not a condition that is considered to present a danger to public health (not transmissible), so people will have to buy their own insulin and testing supplies, or show up at the emergency ward when they become extremely ill as a result of not having them. That's the evil part. 

HIV has been classified as a disease that presents a danger to the public health, which is a first in the status of HIV with respect to our immigration rules. On the upside, this means that people who need antiretroviral medications will be able to have these covered by the trimmed-down program. For those whose past treatment or other factors have led them also to have diabetes, their insulin will be their own problem. 

On the more underhanded side, we are being led to accept that HIV is a danger to public health, which is setting us up for another problem down the line that we didn't think we would have to fight again. You see, there are two health-related reasons that an independent immigrant to Canada can be refused. The first is that the person represents a danger to the public health, and this used to be reserved for diseases like tuberculosis, that can be transmitted through the air. It was always clear that this reason did not apply to HIV. The second reason was the one most evoked to refuse HIV-positive immigrants: that the person would represent an undue burden on the health care system, generally interpreted as an analysis of the expected ten-year cost of the person, compared to the average Canadian. Many will point out that the application of this has been uneven at best. 

So now we are put in the position of accepting a classification that would exclude all HIV-positive independent immigrants in order to ensure that the most vulnerable of us — refugee claimants often arriving traumatized and depleted from horrific situations in their countries of origin — can get the health care they need. Or at least a part of what they need. 

In the last week of June, as the date of the new rules crept closer, Québec's Minister of Health announced that the province will cover these costs, as doing so will ultimately save money: managing health has always been less expensive that treating emergencies in hospitals. Québec expects this to cost about $5 million per year and is pressing Ottawa to cover the cost. I expect that other provinces will echo that call, as I hope they will also step up to avert the immediate crisis. 

A little context? $5 million in Québec means about $20 million for all of the refugee claimants who were covered by the Federal Interim Health Program before we celebrated Canada Day 2012. By comparison, the federal government will spend $28 million this year to celebrate the War of 1812, and one of the celebrated F-35 fighter jets would cover the cost of maintaining this program as it was for ten to twenty years, depending on whose figures for the cost of the jets you believe. 

So Happy Canada Day to a country whose government seems to prioritize celebrating past wars and arming for future ones over ensuring the health of some of the most vulnerable people on its territory. Are we all proud now?