Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a virus which attacks your immune system, making it easier to get sick. Cancer stage at diagnosis tells you how bad the disease is. When a cancer is diagnosed at a late stage, it has had more time to grow, making it harder to treat. People who are more likely to get HIV are also more likely be diagnosed with late stage cancer and die from cancer. I am interested in Manitobans and Ontarians living with cancer. I want to find out whether having cancer and HIV makes you more likely to have worse cancer outcomes compared to having cancer without HIV. I will use information from cancer and death records in Manitoba (1983-2018) and Ontario (1992-2018) to determine cancer stage at diagnosis and who died of their cancer. In Manitoba, before 2007, blood tests for HIV did not include any information that would identify the individual. This means, it is not possible to find out who had HIV, using blood test data, before that time. I will use doctor visits, hospital visits, and prescriptions to find out if someone had HIV before 2007, which will allow for more research on HIV to be performed, in Manitoba. I will use cancer stage at diagnosis as a way to determine whether someone had access to cancer screening. If people who have cancer and HIV have different cancer stages at diagnosis than people who have cancer without HIV this means they have different access to cancer screening. I will use who died of their cancer as a way to determine whether someone had access to cancer screening, diagnostic services, and the right medicine. If people who have cancer and HIV die of cancer more often than people who have cancer without HIV this means they have different access to cancer screening, diagnostic services, and the right medicine. Finding these differences would mean that cancer care programs for people who have HIV need to be looked at to make sure they provide the same level of care as cancer programs for people who do not have HIV.