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First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful
rbarreira writes "Xinhua online is reporting on the success of the first trial phase of an AIDS vaccine, which was started on March 2005. From the article: '"Forty-nine healthy people who received the injection showed no severe adverse reactions after 180 days, proving the vaccine was safe," said Zhang Wei, head of the pharmaceutical registration department of the SFDA. "The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity," he told the press conference.' After the results are further analyzed, 800 more voluntaries may be needed for the second and third phases of the vaccine's trial."
Does it work though? Have these people been exposed properly to HIV and did they really reist picking it up?
All it takes is one night in the wrong club at the wrong time and no matter what kind of protection you have -- it could be too late.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
"The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity," Doesn't it take a little longer to know if HIV is going to take hold? "Immune" is a little presumptive at this point.
I think that even with birth defects a cure for AIDS would be useful.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The actual press release is more cautious than the excerpt that is quoted here; describing the result of the trials as saying that the vaccine is "safe and possibly effective." Apparently there were no ill effects, and if I interpret the text correctly, they detected antibodies against whatever these people were injected with. Which does not prove at all that the vaccine could be effective, because the envelope proteins of HIV are so variable that buidling up immunity is enormously difficult. However, it is probably as much as one could reasonably hope for in this first phase of trials.
That said, there is nothing in this press release to suggest that this vaccine trial will have a better outcome than the series of failed trials that have already preceded it. Mainly because there is very little information in this press release at all. Obviously, it was written by someone who did not have a clue about the science behind the trials; you can't tell from this what the vaccine consists of and how it is supposed to work. More worryingly, the "director of the National Institute for the Control of Pharmaceutical and Biological Products" is quoted as saying that "The HIV-1 specific cells injected into the recipients were the DNA fragments of the virus which don't cause infection." Which is nonsensical enough to suggest that the aforementioned director, who held the press conference, doesn't have a clue either. Probably he is more remarkable for his political skills than his medical ability.
But maybe these Chinese researchers are on the right track -- who knows? A vaccine against HIV is very much needed, and the hope that we will be able to create one seems to shrink with every new failure.
They probably had 50. (Well, more likely 100, with 1/2 in the placebo group.) One of the non-placebo patients dropped out of the study due to some exclusion criteria not related to the vaccine (such as getting hit by a car) and you end up with the 49. It could even be as simple as the patient having moved to another city. With any clinical trial, you're bound to lose some subjects to follow up.
Right, because nobody ever caught aids without having unprotected sex with strangers first. Not one single person, nope. (/sarcasm off)
What about blood transfusions, broken condoms, infected partners that picked it up via adultery, rape victims and dumb kids who don't know any better (since we don't teach them safe sex, and they're too hormoned-up not to fuck)? That doesn't even get into the mess over in Africa. Are you seriously prepared to condemn every single infected person simply due to the fact that many of the dying got that way from carelessness?
An ounch of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That doesn't mean however that you can always prevent bad things from happening, or that we shouldn't care enough to try and find a cure.
And by the way, your arguement can be twisted for just about anything. Why should we try to develop a cure for cancer? Those people should have known to get themselves checked up (many cancers can be detected early, via screening, thereby removing the need for any miracle cure), and should have known to avoid carcinogens (do you check everything you eat?). Yet to take that stance both condemns people for honest mistakes, and condemns the blamelessly unlucky along with the careless by denying them a cure as well.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I didn't see a journal article that corresponds to this clinical trial but I'd be interested to know if the use of this vaccine precludes later HIV testing.
For the non-biologists: vaccines are often based on exposing the body to a protein from the virus (but not the entire virus). In doing so, the body produces antibodies that recognize the protein. The next time the body sees the protein (i.e. when exposed to the actual virus), the body will be able to quickly destroy the virus particles before the person becomes infected.
However, a lot of tests for viral infection is based on the presence of the antibodies in blood. So, if the person has been immunized using the vaccine, the person will have those antibodies in blood, and it becomes difficult to tell whether the antibodies came as a result of vaccination or infection.
Those are some pretty bold statements to be making without sources. And no, wikipedia is not an acceptable source here, unless it cites some REAL sources.
This is also why some drugs get through the testing hurdles and still manage to kill/harm thousands of people. Even when the statistical formulae work out, there is still the chance that the result was due, in part, to randomness in the population. Consider that 100 is 99.99% of 1,000,000...
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
There's a difference between a vaccine and a cure. If you could cure someone of AIDS and give their immediate descendants of some minor birth defects, that might be worthwhile. But a vaccination is something that would be given to everyone in order to prevent them from getting HIV in the first place. This being the case, birth defects are definitely not an acceptable consequence.
I hate to be a dink
Doesn't show.
Why is it important to develop a way to allow people who have little regard for their own health to remain healthy?
Because compassion is one of the things that makes us human?
(Leaving aside cold-blooded economic arguments about how you'd much rather have healthy productive workers contributing to your economy than sick people who are draining it. AIDS doesn't make business sense.)
This being the case, birth defects are definitely not an acceptable consequence.
Tell that to the gay community.
I cannot be the only one to have noticed that the results of this trial do NOT indicate that the vaccine is effective in protecting against the HIV virus. The trial patients were not ever injected with live HIV viruses.
All that has been demonstrated is that the vaccine doesn't have an immediate lethality in a small group of (presumably) ethnically similary people. They placed HIV virsues in blood samples obtained from these people, and the blood mounted an immune response. I'd like to point out that even people dieing of AIDS demonstrate an immune response to the HIV virus -- this is the very nature of the ELISA test used to diagnose the disease! Further, a demonstrated "immunity" in a small sample of blood is nothing; the body demonstrated immunity to the disease, often for the better part of a decade, before dying of it during the normal course of HIV/AIDS.
So, while any development towards a vaccine for the HIV virus is unquestionably a good things, lets not read too far into this.
Homophobes - The evil gays are spreading disease!
Alternative therapy peddlers - I can cure AIDS with homeopathic medicine!
Politicians - AIDS was made by white men to kill black people!
Jackasses - Sure I'm HIV+ baby, but it doesn't cause AIDS!
Oh, forget it. This is too easy.
Is it just me, or is it bad that the person directing all this can't remember that HIV doesn't have DNA? It only has two copies of single stranded RNA. For that matter, HIV doesn't come in cells, because it's a virus. I *really* don't want anything to do with this vaccine until it's been tested many times with large samples by independent scientists.
Imagine being willing to be shot up with a dead form of the AIDS virus. Which, for all you know, might well end up giving you AIDS.
For the equivalent of $250.
Damn.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Does it? Seriously. That's a pretty big claim. You could make the same claim of diabetes. No cure. Without treatment you will die from it. But nobody thinks of it as a fatal condition. AIDS may well become something similar. Look at Magic Johnson, been diagnosed with HIV for 15 years. As far as anyone knows he is quite healthy. Given the way things look for him, at 47 years old he is more likely to die of old age than HIV/AIDS complications.