No Magic Bullet
Stuff reports on a new vaccine that has been shown to provide some protection against AIDS. The vaccine was shown to reduce the incidence of contracting the disease by 31%. All other vaccines against AIDS have been abject failures. While this is indeed great news, the MacDoctor cautions against breaking out the champaign.
- 31% is by no means an adequate enough response to use in a vaccination program. At that rate the side effects may outweigh the benefit (remember, only a very small percentage of people in a mass vaccination program would have contracted AIDS anyway). In addition, the cost of such a campaign is very likely to far exceed the benefit.
- The conductors of the trial have no idea how they managed to get an immunological response. This means a vaccine is still many years, perhaps a decade away.
- It is not known how long the immunological effect will last.
- The vaccine has only been demonstrated to have an effect on the Thai strain of the disease. The vaccine contains elements of the US strain and the Thai strain, but nothing of the African strain which 67% of AIDS sufferers have. It is very likely that the vaccine will be ineffective against this strain.
Still, this is not only the first trial to actually show an effect, it is also the first trial to use large numbers of a relatively low-risk population (most trials have been on high-risk populations). This makes the result much more significant as it hints that a vaccine could be developed for mass immunisation purposes. This provides real hope that the disease could even be eradicated at some stage.
This vaccine is no magic bullet in the fight against AIDS, but it provides the glimmer of a hope that there might be one, somewhere…
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Sep 26 09 1:23 pm
You can’t have a vaccine against AIDS, its a syndrome.
Against HIV yes – I guess you could but not against AIDS the purported end result of HIV infection.
I’d be prepared to bet a substantial sum that this goes nowhere.
I first got interested in science as a kid and since then I have seen literally thousands of stories like this offering a potential breakthroughs, usually in cancer research, that go nowhere. These stories are more about the researcher maintaining his/her funding rather than any real “breakthrough”.
I could be wrong of course but color me very cynical
A sort of light blue-green?
You are right about AIDS/HIV, of course, but I tend to try and keep my posts lay-person friendly and “AIDS vaccine” is more descriptive than “HIV vaccine”, albeit not technically accurate.
Sep 28 09 2:12 pm
Since you have seen the study (as I assume from your post), and have the medical knowledge to understand it, how did they actually test it?
Please tell me they did not expose people to the virus to see if they got it?
Sep 28 09 9:18 pm
Dolf:
Rest easy. Part of a population was immunised and then nature was allowed to take its course – people were infected in the normal course of their daily lives, they were not “exposed” to it.
Oct 21 09 10:49 am
Told ya so AIDS Vaccine Is of Modest Help, Fuller Research Says
Modest is still better than no help at all…