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world aids day 2025: fighting the stigma behind canada's rising hiv rates
6 minute read
ashley rose murphy was born with hiv, passed to her from her birth mom. with ongoing treatment, she has a full life ahead of her, and her hiv status is undetectable and untransmissible.
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ashley rose murphy is an open book about her life now, but she remembers how hard it was to be upfront and confident about her health in high school. early in grade 9, when most students feel vulnerable and anxious to fit in, she was talking in a school hallway with a few acquaintances when something happened that threw her into turmoil.
a girl she didn’t know randomly came up to her and blurted out in front of everybody, “do you have hiv?”
she felt the sting of her privacy being violated and responded with an emphatic “no.” then she ran from the group in tears.
“i felt really, really bad for that situation for a lot of reasons,” she says of the stigma that surrounds hiv—human immunodeficiency virus—and the pain of the memory.
“i don’t know how she found out about my status. i was pretty open about it in high school, but a little more hush-hush when i started… so, in the beginning, i was a little more nervous.”
the vaughan, ontario woman is now 27, a national youth ambassador for the canadian foundation for aids research (canfar) and an advocate to end bullying and stigma that comes from misconceptions. hiv is a virus that spreads from person to person through certain bodily fluids that come into contact with the new person. the virus weakens the immune system by infecting and killing white blood cells. and when it’s left untreated and has advanced, hiv becomes aids, where infections and diseases can be fatal. while there is no cure for hiv and aids, there are effective ways to prevent, test for and treat hiv.
see the person, not the status campaign
world aids day is december 1, with canfar celebrating a campaign to “see the person, not the status.” everyone has an hiv status, whether it’s positive, negative or unknown and getting tested is empowerment to stop the spread. as the public health agency of canada reports, in 2023, new cases rose by 35 per cent, marking the highest rates of transmission in more than a decade.
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by comparison, new hiv infections continue to fall in multiple high-income nations that are part of the g7. the consistent rise of hiv throughout canada is a fact that should generate alarm among healthcare providers, just as we see advocacy groups and community leaders invest in transmission reduction programs.
the narrative is outdated: hiv in canada started with men who have sex with men in major cities, with the peak of the outbreak in the 1990s hitting across the globe. the death rates were staggering as people quickly died from aids after contracting hiv without treatment. globally, about 2.6 million people died from aids in 1999 alone.
the development of antiretroviral therapy (art) has transformed the prognosis. art suppresses viral load levels so that people like ashley can have a near-normal lifespan with almost complete transmission prevention.
canfar breaks the numbers down this way: every four hours, someone in canada is diagnosed with hiv, yet many canadians don’t know hiv cases are increasing.
canadians unaware of growing hiv epidemic
canfar and gilead sciences have released new polling data by leger, which found that while 44 per cent of canadians view rising hiv rates as a public health concern, over three-quarters (76 per cent) are unaware that rates have increased in the last five years. the world aids day campaign aims to address the gap in public understanding, noting that heterosexual contact leads to new hiv infections in canada, and a third of diagnoses are among women. indigenous people, african, caribbean and black communities, racialized women and people who inject substances are “overrepresented in canada’s hiv epidemic.”
results from the poll reveal that only 16 per cent correctly identify male-to-female sexual contact as the leading cause of transmission. instead, injection drug use (35 per cent) and male-to-male sexual contact (33 per cent) were thought to be the most common ways of contracting hiv. another key point, nearly half (47 per cent) are aware that there is medication that can be taken to prevent hiv before exposure.
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“we want others to know that hiv, just because you may not be hearing about it in the mainstream, doesn’t mean that it’s not still here,” ashley says. “i feel like if people actually knew these facts, i feel like we would be a lot more knowledgeable as a society in terms of how to speak about sexual health, how to teach it. it can be a very taboo topic for some, but for some, having this conversation could also be life-changing.”
hiv stigma and finding the right support
looking back at her 14-year-old self, ashley understands the conflicting emotions that followed the high school hallway encounter.
“i felt embarrassed, but i was also kind of upset with myself that i was lying. i felt like i was hiding something from someone. not that i felt like i owed it to them, but at the same time, something felt wrong about it.” she came home and told her mom, one of her closest supporters, what had happened. “she noticed i was so shaken up from it, she was like, ‘ashley, you go to that girl the next day and you tell her what’s up. you tell her why you’re upset and what’s going on.’”
she was afraid of confrontation, but she did exactly what her mom advised and the girl ended up apologizing.
“i was like 14, but i’ve lived my life knowing that things are going to be tough,” she says. “you’ve got to trudge along and do the thing that’s hard because sometimes you don’t know what that’s going to result in. like i didn’t know that she was going to apologize.”
another time, one of her friends wanted to invite her to hang out at her house, and she told ashley that her parents said they would need to give her plastic plates, cups and utensils (for fear of hiv transmission). her friend stood up and told her parents that that wasn’t right or ok. “it was really inspiring to see that my friend had taken that upon herself to try and educate her parents a little bit. we were 15.”
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there’s so much uncertainty about living with hiv and how people will react, even though ashley was born with hiv, contracted from her birth mother. it was beyond her control and all she ever knew. she was adopted by a family who helped manage her normal—all the doctor’s appointments, support groups, summer camps for kids with hiv, and daily medications that are lifesaving, making the virus undetectable and untransmissible.
her family has also seen her through sickness, bone loss and hair loss, which are some of the medication side effects. still, early on, when treatment wasn’t as advanced as today, there was no telling if she would live to go to university or get married, if those were things she wanted. ashley went on to study theatre at york university in toronto. she works on the york campus for the non-profit hillel international to support jewish students, and she’s engaged, planning her wedding for july 2027.
“if you have a good support system and you have a positive attitude, you can get through it,” she says of the challenges of hiv. “i know that’s easier said than done. but truly, i would not be where i am today without the support of my family, my friends, my community. that’s always pushed me forward.”
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