Dr. John Blatherwick: Public Safety

City of Vancouver Chief Medical Health Officer, Dr. John Blatherwick, sits at his office desk and explains why Gay Games is not a threat to public health.

Dr. Blatherwick : “The Gay Games and AIDS has become linked and large numbers of people have said, “Why don’t we ban the Gay Games because of AIDS?” The fact is that AIDS is not a casually transmitted disease. Public health is responsible for those diseases that are transmitted from person to person and the person doesn’t have to do anything to acquire it; things like tuberculosis. So public health deals with those kinds of issues. Public health and the law have failed over centuries to deal with sexually transmitted diseases where consenting adults have sex between themselves. The interesting thing about the Gay Games is that we have the first large convention of people coming to town in which educational material on how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases is actually being distributed. Now given if you could find a rationale for banning the Gay Games, you would have had the same rationale for banning Expo ’86 and any other large conventions that bring together large numbers of people.  Because inevitably in those large numbers of people coming to a convention or to a sporting event you have gay men. Therefore, we don’t want to do that. What we want to do is we want to educate the competitors and we want to make sure that they know that they are responsible for their health. Nobody in Vancouver is at any risk from any of the competitors coming here unless they put themselves at risk.”