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Manitoba has declared a public health emergency as the province continues to see some of the highest HIV rates in Canada, the provincial chief public health officer announced Thursday.
“In 2024, we reported a rate of 19.5 cases per 100,000 [people], which is roughly 3½ times that of Canada’s rate of 5.5,” Dr. Brent Roussin said at a news conference Thursday.
“This emergency is driven by a number of factors, one being injection drug use, homelessness, mental health issues, as well as a rise in other sexually transmitted and bloodborne infections, as well as various barriers to access to care.”
Rates of the disease have “sharply risen over the last number of years,” he said.
There were 328 new cases reported in 2025 — more than double the 142 cases recorded in 2021 and more than three times more than the 90 cases seen in 2019.
So far in 2026, new cases of the disease are similar to what the province recorded in the first quarter of 2025, Roussin said.
The province of Manitoba has declared a public health emergency over rising numbers of new HIV cases. Dr Brent Roussin, Manitoba’s chief provincial public health officer, says there has been a dramatic increase in the number of cases in the province’s north and southwest health regions.
Declaring a public health emergency opens up “a number of options” for the province to increase traditional and non-traditional forms of HIV testing, but the government also sees it as an awareness tool, Roussin said.
“We want to bring this level of urgency and awareness to all of our partners, to Manitobans,” he said.
“There’s going to be a lot of cross-governmental work, both federally and provincially and at the community level, but addressing the issues related to injection drug use has to be a component of this response.”
It’s the first time Manitoba has declared a public health emergency related to HIV, Roussin said.
The idea to declare a public health emergency was driven by a gathering in late 2025 that included Indigenous leaders and community organizations, both of which have been “sounding the alarm” over HIV rates in the province, Roussin said.
But he doesn’t want the announcement to “detract from the fantastic work” that Manitoba health and community organizations have been doing to combat rising cases, he said.
‘Acknowledging the reality’
“As we see the numbers continue to climb, despite all of that great work, this is the next step that we’re going to take right now,” he said.
“This emergency — it’s not about creating fear. It’s about acknowledging the reality that individuals and communities are facing right now and to address that with a level of urgency.”
In 2024, about 70 per cent of HIV transmission in Manitoba was related to injection drug use. Heterosexual transmission was another major factor, Roussin said.
“Those are the biggest drivers of the transmission right now.”
Over half the cases in the province are in female patients, compared to a 32 per cent average across Canada, the province said in a news release.
Most newly diagnosed female patients are younger than 40, which increases the risk of perinatal cases, the province said.
Infants were born with the disease twice in recent years — once in 2024 and once in 2025, the province said. The last case before that was recorded in 2021.
Boost preventative drug
The province wants to increase the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, a preventative drug that significantly lowers a person’s risk of contracting HIV, Roussin said.
Although the majority of new HIV cases in Manitoba are in female patients, Roussin said women “access very little” of the drug, and “very few people using injection drugs” are using it as well.
Manitoba’s highest rates of HIV are in the Northern Regional Health Authority and the Prairie Mountain Health region in the province’s southwest, but the Winnipeg health region continues to see the highest number of cases overall, he said.
Indigenous people are disproportionately affected by HIV, one of the ongoing effects of colonization, Roussin said.
“This is significant, it’s concerning, and it requires a co-ordinated action across governments, communities and health systems.”
The complex issues factoring into Manitoba’s high rates of the disease “require much more than simply a public health response,” he said.
“We are collaborating with Indigenous leadership, community organizations [and] federal partners to address the conditions driving HIV transmission.”
