AIDS Vaccine Is Partially Successful

ifchairscouldtalk writes "A Phase III 'RV 144' study in Thailand succeeded in reducing HIV infection rate in trial with 31.2% effectiveness. The study was conducted by the Thailand Ministry of Public Health and used strains of HIV common in Thailand. It is not clear whether the vaccine, which combines AIDSVAX with Aventis Pasteur ALVAC-HIV canarypox vector, known as 'vCP1521,' would work against other strains in the United States, Africa or elsewhere. Strangely, the vaccine had no effect on levels of HIV in the blood of those who did become infected, providing 'one of the most important and intriguing findings' of the trial, according to Dr Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of the trial's sponsors."

Comments

Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS is a real finding people. THIS is helping people. Swine flu vaccine is manipulating people. Gullible fucking sheep.

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

Helping queer's and druggy's.

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

There is only one cure for AIDS. If you are tested positive for HIV, total quarantine for the rest of your life (with everyone else with HIV).

Libya is a good choice of locations.

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! Now I feel more confident when I take Rob's tiny pecker up my ass and swallow his load. Bring on the cum, baby! Wooo

Re:Thumbs up

[Beardo the Bearded]

The highest-rising infected group is heterosexual women in their 20s.

Look it up.

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

If all the fagots and druggies already have HIV/AIDS it's obvious that another group would become the fastest rising infected group.

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.. I saw 'HIV vaccine partly successful' and thought, great, what the world really needs are more straight people and boy-girl relationships. Yuck... him sticking his thing in her thing... it's just not natural!

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

And nigger's. Don't forget the nigger's.

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the virus came from a monkey, which is a nigger, so how can you forget the group that caused this AIDS epidemic?

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mother obviously fucked a druggie about your age + 8 months ago. I'm presuming you came prematurely which explains that tad of extra retard in your brain.

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. Look who posted this story. CmdrTaco. I don't think that is a coincidence, do you?

Re:Thumbs up

[jgarra23]

Helping queer's and druggy's.

Instead of spreading hate- why not work on your English? There are no apostrophes in the plural form of "queers" or "druggies". Furthermore, "druggie" is not spelled "druggy".

Re:Thumbs up

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to quote stats, get it right.

  The #1 growing AIDS population is BLACK and HISPANIC woman in their 20's. No, I'm not a racist, but these are the facts you carefully omitted.

Re:Thumbs up

[Beardo the Bearded]

I wasn't aware that "BLACK and HISPANIC" was a sexual orientation. Thanks for the clarification.

Re:Thumbs up

[shaitand]

I wasn't aware that 20's was a sexual orientation either.

Re:Thumbs up

[shaitand]

"Druggie" is not a word, so I am not certain how you are correcting its spelling.

Re:Thumbs up

[compro01]

Merriam-Webster disagrees with you.

Re:Thumbs up

[LionMage]

"Druggie" is not a word, so I am not certain how you are correcting its spelling.

Well, several dictionaries do not agree with you.

Here is the entry from dictionary.com -- note that according to the Random House entry, "druggy" is an acceptable alternate spelling, contrary to the GP. The Merriam-Webster entry also indicates "druggy" as a variant spelling.

Here is the entry from the Oxford English Dictionary, widely considered to be authoritative on all dialects of the English language.

So, the GP may have been wrong for taking you (or whoever) to task for the "druggy" spelling, but you are most certainly wrong that it is not a word. Next time, do a little research. A slang term that has entered common use is still a word, regardless of its origins.

Also, the GP was very much right for calling out the hate speech for what it was.

Lulz

[Anonymous Coward]

". They then got regular tests for the AIDS virus for three years. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did. Although the difference was small, Dr. Kim said it was statistically significant and meant the vaccine was 31.2 percent effective." It doesn't mean anything. too small of a sample. anyways, point is, someone do some analysis on the statistics and tell us all something and get +5

Re:Lulz

[Ultra64]

You should go teach the doctors and scientists what they are doing wrong.

Re:Lulz

[4D6963]

It doesn't mean anything. too small of a sample

No you dumb cunt, if you had any clue what you're talking about you'd know it is comfortably significant. Can't do the math to tell you the precise odds because I forgot how, but it's big enough to tell you that it works for sure.

Re:Lulz

[kdawgud]

The sample sizes were not 74 and 51. The sample size of people vaccinated was "more than 16,000 volunteers". 74 and 51 were just the number of people infected, which is still statistically significant. [to what confidence level, I do not know].

Re:Lulz

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh no retard, this wasn't even remotely a controlled experiment. Unless they exposed all of the participants to HIV, how can you make any real conclusions about the effectiveness of the vaccine?

Re:Lulz

[Kjella]

Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.

Re:Lulz

[Profane MuthaFucka]

It would be unethical to expose all participants to HIV. They did the next best thing.

There's nothing wrong with the basic idea of the study design. Of course, they may have fucked it up, but that's a different situation.

Re:Lulz

[4D6963]

Dude, just shut the fuck up and read about the laws of large numbers/statistics in general because that's all it's about. I don't see how anyone can fail to see that the fact that people weren't systematically infected has no statistical relevance. Fucking morons. I understand why you're posting as AC.

Re:Lulz

[smooth wombat]

we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics...

Because not all of us have had statistics. I won't be taking my statistics class until next year and that's only because I'm going back to school to add to my degrees.

While I understand the basics of statistics and how they are generated, don't ask me to do any computations.

Then again, some people are simply beyond help when it comes to accepting facts or well established principles.

Re:Lulz

[bluefoxlucid]

The next best thing was to give a placebo such that the control group would be confident in their new-found immunity to HIV, at least as much as the experimental group. Otherwise the control would use more condoms because they're not on the experimental vaccine. This should have been controlled against a normal group with a similar profile as well, and another with a similar profile but specifically taken to safe sex practices.

Re:Lulz

[MadnessASAP]

But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.

Welcome to America, here's your churro.

Re:Lulz

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Didn't the article say that one group got a vaccine, and the other got a placebo?

"Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the armyâ(TM)s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos."

Oh yea, that's what it said.

I don't see anything wrong with the basic kind of study. As I said, they may have fucked it up somehow, such as fucking up the selection of the participants and grouping them.

And why would they want to control against additional groups? They're measuring one thing. How effective is the vaccine. Your proposal to control against other groups are actually separate studies. They can and should be run independently at first. I can totally understand them not wanting to add complexity to a study that already has more than 16,000 participants.

So, I still don't see any valid objection as to why this kind of study won't work or is flawed somehow. In fact, this basic type of study is done all the time.

Re:Lulz

[Artifakt]

The total working group for this test was around 16,000 people. Only 125 actually became infected with HIV during those 3 years. The infected portion shows about 1/3 more in the placebo group. So yes, the sample is statistically significant, and someone wasted a mod point.

Re:Lulz

[bluefoxlucid]

Simply for additional study. Do safe practices actually DRASTICALLY increase your resistance? What about the control group "Selective with partners" that wants to "get to know you" and try to determine if you seem sane rather than just fucking nameless strangers??

Re:Lulz

[dyingtolive]

Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.

True, but I don't think it's anti-math, I think it is a deeply ingrained sense that anytime anyone breaks out statistics, its because they're using it to lie about something. I blame it on the overuse of them in overbearing advertising (4/5 doctors agree that the Happy Time Fun Company antibacterial whatever, made from all organic compounds, will kill 99.9% of bacteria*)


* (in microscopic fine print) Bacteria that was killed was either harmless bacteria or crazy moon bacteria you will never interact with. Harmful bacteria is unharmed by all Happy Time products. None of the above statements are evaluated by the FDA. Our product does nothing at best, and is harmful to you at worst.

Re:Lulz

[droptone]

The next best thing was to give a placebo such that the control group would be confident in their new-found immunity to HIV, at least as much as the experimental group. Otherwise the control would use more condoms because they're not on the experimental vaccine.

This page and this page indicate that the study was double-blind. If it was, then I do not see how your worry is reasonable. If both groups were unaware of whether they received the treatment or not, then I do not see how one group that happened to be the control group would reliably act differently than the experimental group. Am I missing something? Or are you claiming that once people believe they have the vaccine, that they will have more unprotected sex and thus increase their risk of contracting HIV?

Re:Lulz

[droptone]

Because Slashdot houses people who are clever enough to poke obvious holes in research but either lack the mathematical skills, the energy or the disposition to determine whether their vague objection is meaningful? My personal theory has long been that tech folk are underused cognitively, so they do not gain an adequate "respect" for the difficulties inherent in other fields (this may also due to the type of personality that is attracted to tech-like work). Scan through any Slashdot thread on psychology and/or economics and you'll find droves of people who seem to think that those respective disciplines have overlooked some minor issue. The arrogance is helpful in the sense that you can see through the various falsehoods that are considered true in those disciplines, but it also can contribute to the type of sloppy thinking that you have a problem with.

Re:Lulz

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Unfortunately, as the article notes, the sample groups may themselves be problematic. A previous study of another vaccine that was found to *increase* infection rates may not have been dangerous; they just neglected to control for circumcision and intravenous drug use. Given this study dates back to before the end of the previous study, their samples may be skewed the opposite direction. Circumcision has been found to reduce the risk of infection by 40-70%. IV drug use is insanely dangerous (I don't know the exact multiplier, but it is rather high). If the test group had a couple hundred extra circumcised individuals, or a dozen or so IV drug users, it could easily skew the results.

Of course, this is still overlooking another problem with the vaccine. It's not one injection, or even one plus a booster or two. It's a two vaccine regimen, with six injections of each component, for twelve total shots (they may eventually be combined, but that all depends on whether the components react with each other outside the body). And the duration of the protective effect is unknown, and likely short (since the vaccine doesn't seem to trigger the production of antibodies). Even if it was incredibly cheap, it's hard to get people to follow up for a second MMR shot, or keep up to date on their tetanus, both of which protect against diseases which are easier to catch without engaging in risky behavior. Can you imagine asking people to pay a few hundred dollars (a guess based on the cost of Gardasil), and visit the doctor half a dozen times to get such a relatively small benefit (reducing risk by about a third, with only two years of testing)?

Even if we assume the samples are good, this is only a first step, and a very short one at that.

In response to the PP: I suspect the confidence level is 95%. Most published studies require that level of precision, and no one likes to hamstring themselves by demanding greater confidence; after all, they spent a lot of money and rejecting the drug would waste it. Of course, if you've ever played D&D, you know how often you get fumbles or critical successes. 95% means the odds of it being insignificant could be as high as the odds of fumbling a roll.

Re:Lulz

[AndersOSU]

that's all well and good, but if you don't understand statistics, you probably shouldn't be complaining about the statistics in a study that is undergoing peer review.

I'm not saying you're complaining about the study, I just don't think the excuse you presented holds water.

Re:Lulz

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the Binomial Distribution [stattrek.com]

Probability of success on a single trial = 0.5
Number of trials = 125 (74+51)
Number of successes (x) = 74
Cumulative Probability: P(X is greater or equal to 74) = 0.02433

The probability that the vaccine did not have any effect is 2.4%

Re:Lulz

[dyingtolive]

that's all well and good, but if you don't understand statistics, you probably shouldn't be complaining about the statistics in a study that is undergoing peer review.

I'm not saying you're complaining about the study, I just don't think the excuse you presented holds water.

that's all well and good, but if you don't understand how the government/economy works, you shouldn't be complaining about the president when there is a recession?

People complain for the sake of complaining, and usually those who complain the loudest know the least about what they're complaining about. I cover an escalation spot on a technical helldesk, and I've heard people bitch about some of the biggest non-issues I've ever heard. Sometimes their bitch was about things they were entirely wrong about. It's called misplaced aggression. People have to bitch at everything they can because it's illegal to just go out and kill the person who pissed you off to begin with.

Re:Lulz

[SoVeryTired]

And why the shitting crikey are you using the binomial distribution? HIV infection is a rare event with numerous chances to happen, so it will be well modelled by a Poisson distribution.

Re:Lulz

[Kell Bengal]

From TFA:

Dr. Fauci said that scientists would seldom consider licensing a vaccine less than 70 or 80 percent effective, but he added,"If you have a product that's even a little bit protective, you want to look at the blood samples and figure out what particular response was effective and direct research from there."

They don't expect to be selling this as is - they know it's not good enough. Instead, they're going to use the results to further research until they can produce a better, practical vaccine.

Re:Lulz

[beckett]

Don't be too concerned, i think a Humanities undergrad just happened to get the first post this time, that's all.

Re:Lulz

[evanbd]

Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations.

Explanations of confidence intervals are one of the most frequently mistaken pieces of stats comments. The correct explanation goes something like this: If your results are significant at the 5% level, then that means that if there was no difference between the two groups, you would observe results at least this unlikely less than 5% of the time by random chance. We cannot say that the hypothesis (the vaccine works) is 95% likely to be true; it either is or isn't. What we can say is how *unlikely* we would be to observe this result purely by luck, in the absence of any actual difference.

Re:Lulz

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

You say "just fucking nameless strangers" like it is a bad thing. :)

Re:Lulz

[commodore64_love]

I would but since I'm a nerd and nerds don't have sex.....

Well let's just say I'm not concerned about AIDS. Now obesity from eating too many potato chips - THERE'S something to worry about. Isn't it about time someone developed a pill to absorb fat from your food, and carry it out the opposite end? Something like olestra but less icky.

Re:Lulz

[Hatta]

I think it's because computer nerds expect things to be true or false without all the messiness of statistics.

Re:Lulz

[Hatta]

Scan through any Slashdot thread on psychology and/or economics and you'll find droves of people who seem to think that those respective disciplines have overlooked some minor issue

Given the track record of the fields of psychology and economics, it's certain that those respective disciplines have overlooked some major issues.

Re:Lulz

[ArcherB]

...rather than just fucking nameless strangers??

Phew! I'm safe. All the strangers I've done the horizontal mambo with had names. I can't tell you what they were, but I know for certain that they had names.

Re:Lulz

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Of course, that's only worthwhile if the study sample wasn't flawed from the get go. If it was, they'll be devoting resources to research that, by definition, won't produce useful results.

Re:Lulz

[Omestes]

Hey! I was a humanities undergrad (philosophy), and had to bathe daily in statistics and scientific methodology. I'm not saying all humanities undergrads were in the same boat, but you still made a false generalization. Not all humanities people are rank morons, or completely uninformed. I think the morons are pretty well uniformly distributed throughout ALL disciplines.

Re:Lulz

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the trooleans. (a 3 state 1/0/-1 or true/false/!@#$? variable)

P.S. Welcome to the 32bit Windows API. Welcome to hell.

Re:Lulz

[shaitand]

'Or are you claiming that once people believe they have the vaccine, that they will have more unprotected sex and thus increase their risk of contracting HIV?'

Of course they would. Perhaps you enjoy having sex with a piece of rubber but some of us prefer actual contact. Eliminating STD's and circumcision are two of the greatest causes known to man.

Re:Lulz

[shaitand]

Replace "IV Drug use" with "sharing needles" and I would agree with your point on this issue. The problem with the language is that it discriminates against drug use. Drug use does not spread HIV, reducing need availability does.

I would agree that the study should concentrate on uncircumcised men since ideally we shouldn't have to hack off the male genitals.

"protect against diseases which are easier to catch without engaging in risky behavior. Can you imagine asking people to pay a few hundred dollars (a guess based on the cost of Gardasil), and visit the doctor half a dozen times to get such a relatively small benefit (reducing risk by about a third, with only two years of testing)?"

You believe that eliminating the risk from anonymous sex would be a small benefit? The flaw in your thought is that people actively avoid being stabbed by rusty nails. Nobody wants to have to avoid or restrict sex. Ideally we could safely couple with as many partners as we could manage. An aids vaccine wouldn't get us there but an aids vaccine coupled with a male version of the pill would certainly help.

Re:Lulz

[ShakaUVM]

Why is it that on slashdot of all places that should be full of nerds we get idiots that don't grasp basic statistics and people that mod it up? As long as you got a proper control group it's simple to say "If we assume the true probability is the same, how unlikely is it that we get these results?" Of course there's something about the level of confidence - a 99% confidence means there's a 1% your observation is random fluctuations. But the whole "we reject math and logic because the numbers feel to small" sounds like the results of retarded anti-schooling.

Due to ethical reasons, they couldn't do a proper study by administering the vaccine and then trying to infect people with HIV, and observing the results. Instead they sort of turned people loose into the wild, and an unknown number of those were actually exposed to the HIV virus in each group. Perhaps the incidence of HIV exposure is a random process, perhaps not. There could be unseen biases between the two groups which could account for the 10 or so person difference in infection rates. The vaccine might actually be 0% effective.

Re:Lulz

[ShakaUVM]

>>We cannot say that the hypothesis (the vaccine works) is 95% likely to be true; it either is or isn't. What we can say is how *unlikely* we would be to observe this result purely by luck, in the absence of any actual difference.

Well, it depends if you subscribe to the Bayesian model of statistical truth or not. This is actually a fairly significant philosophical point.

Re:Lulz

[TheRaven64]

Because not all of us have had statistics. I won't be taking my statistics class until next year and that's only because I'm going back to school to add to my degrees.

It's such a shame that it's impossible to learn things without taking a class on them. If only someone would collect knowledge in a form that is accessible to the general public. Maybe they could print it onto paper pages, bind them together, and store them in large, public buildings. Or possibly they could use these newfangled 'computer' things. I hear they can be networked together to make access to information easy...

Re:Lulz

[Anonymous Coward]

to people who are at a high risk of becoming infected with HIV then it would be worth getting a vaccine. the problem is this vaccine may not do anything for people in the US because the strains common to Thailand could be very different. also, IV drug use is only dangerous, in the sense of risking contracting HIV or hep c, if the person injecting is sharing needles with someone else.

Re:Lulz

[evanbd]

If you subscribe to that model, you still can't say that the vaccine is 95% likely to work; you need a prior estimate for the likelihood the vaccine works, which you can then modify based on the results of the study.

Re:Lulz

[Anonymous Coward]

Circumcision has been found to reduce the risk of infection by 40-70%.

This is complete nonsense and nobody takes it seriously. The 'studies' in Africa were methodologically flawed and they contradict further statistical studies from developed countries like New Zealand. There was even a recent study in South Africa---a mathematical model---that showed circumcision to be almost useless (it was 20x more effective and much less invasive to promote condoms, testing, and treatment), and that's in a region where 20% of the population has HIV.

Quit spreading FUD.

Re:Lulz

[Anonymous Coward]

From your own link:

"The Poisson distribution can be derived as a limiting case to the binomial distribution as the number of trials goes to infinity and the expected number of successes remains fixed."

"In several of the above examples---for example, the number of mutations in a given sequence of DNA---the events being counted are actually the outcomes of discrete trials, and would more precisely be modelled using the binomial distribution."

However this was not what I was doing. Notice that I use 125 trials and not 16402 or 8201. Given 125 infected people and 50% success on a single trial. What is the probability that 74 or more will be in the placebo group?

Re:Lulz

[StuartHankins]

What do you mean? Don't chicks dig people who design cranes? You could always use that as a pickup line or something...

Re:Lulz

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes... and no. Nowadays you have to really trust someone to go unprotected. The stuff you can catch is bad enough you might as well catch fire.

Ahh, I remember the days when that wasn't the case...

Re:Lulz

[shaitand]

"Yes... and no. Nowadays you have to really trust someone to go unprotected. The stuff you can catch is bad enough you might as well catch fire."

Yeah.... to quote myself in the post you replied to.

"Eliminating STD's and circumcision are two of the greatest causes known to man."

So I guess... we agree?

Re:Lulz

[bluefoxlucid]

Circumcision is the greatest cause known to man? What? I mean besides that your penis doesn't smell like cheese, so she doesn't complain and refuse to suck it....

Re:Lulz

[droptone]

I am quite confident that both disciplines have gaping holes in their respective theoretical frameworks. I do not see how this entails that an amateur with little to no experience in the field ought to be taken remotely seriously.

Re:Lulz

[psm321]

Isn't that what alli does?

Re:Lulz

[SoVeryTired]

Where are you getting 50% from?

Re:Lulz

[shaitand]

You do know that what is cut off is for a man what a clit is for a woman right? It cuts off most of your nerves leaving you will only a tiny piece of what you are supposed to have. It never grows back, you are desensitized for life.

I think you will also find that circumcision is not a substitute for a shower.

Re:Lulz

[PsiPsiStar]

I think part of the reason people want fat foods is because of how the foods make them feel, not just because of how the foods taste.

HIV Vaccine

[catmandi]

I'm not normally a stickler for these, but AIDS is a syndrome, HIV is the virus that causes it. The vaccine can prevent you from acquiring HIV and thence from developing AIDS. It's not a cure, it's a preventative measure.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing in the summary says anything about a cure, what are you talking about?

Vaccines generally aren't effective as cures, but always as preventative measures. Why do you think most vaccines are required to be administered at a younger age? We want that immunity quickly.

What is interesting about this is that it did have some effectiveness, even if further study is called for. What I fear though is that there are too many mutations of the virus present to be able to generalize a vaccine for the entire world. Region-specific vaccines perhaps, and even these would help stifle the transmission of the disease, but still.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Lord Ender]

You're either a stickler or a natural-born pedant.

It doesn't matter. Everyone knows what they're talking about here. If that makes you sad, go blow your nose in a Kleenex.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[TheRaven64]

The grandparent is disputing the 'AIDS vaccine' nomenclature. This is a vaccine against HIV, not against AIDS. Given that AIDS is a syndrome that is caused by HIV, something that vaccinated against AIDS would have to be a cure for HIV because people can have HIV for years before they develop AIDS.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Pulzar]

I'm not normally a stickler for these, but AIDS is a syndrome, HIV is the virus that causes it. The vaccine can prevent you from acquiring HIV and thence from developing AIDS. It's not a cure, it's a preventative measure.

That's just straight up wrong. If you bothered to read TFA (I know, I know, it's Slashdot), you'd see that the vaccine doesn't have any impact on the amount of HIV in one's blood, and does not prevent one from getting HIV into one's blood. What it does do, though, is reduce the chance of that HIV turning into AIDS.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't care if you're a stickler or not. Who died and made you the big-shot?

Re:HIV Vaccine

[catmandi]

Jesus did - I quote: "Look after the shop, I'm just going to grab a pack of cigarettes."

Re:HIV Vaccine

[TheRaven64]

You seem to be reading a different article to the one posted on Slashdot. The one linked in the summary states that it is an HIV vaccine but it didn't affect the amount of HIV in the blood of those who were infected compared to the placebo. Those who were not infected had no HIV in their blood. This is interesting, because normally a vaccine that is partially effective like this will mean that the people who are infected will have less of the virus in their blood than people who are not vaccinated, but still enough to be infected. This one has an entirely binary success rate; it either makes no difference at all in a particular person, or it makes them immune to the relevant strains of HIV. This implies that there is some other factor at play, possibly something in the genetic makeup of the people who were not infected, which could lead to a universally effective vaccine being developed.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, it doesn't make sense to test for presence of HIV. If you get a flu vaccination, it doesn't prevent you from catching flu virus, it prevents you from developing the disease the flu virus creates by training your immune system to fight it. So people who are immune to HIV may have the HIV virus present, but may not contract AIDS because their immune system fights and kills the virus. Similarly, just because you get a flu vaccine, you can still catch the flu virus, only difference is instead of putting you out of commission for a few days, you end up tired and sneezy one night and the next you're fine.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[catmandi]

*bows before Lord Ender, retreats fearfully*

Re:HIV Vaccine

[catmandi]

I went and had a look at the aforementioned article. I stand by what I said. The vaccine may not create HIV antibodies, but it still prevents the virus from progressing (maybe). You can't have a vaccine against a syndrome, since by its definition, a syndrome is: "In medicine and psychology, the term syndrome refers to the association of several clinically recognizable features, signs (observed by a physician), symptoms (reported by the patient), phenomena or characteristics that often occur together, so that the presence of one feature alerts the physician to the presence of the others. In recent decades the term has been used outside of medicine to refer to a combination of phenomena seen in association." (wikipedia, of course). You immunize against a virus (however that may work) leading to a symptomatic disease, you TREAT the disease itself.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[daveime]

No, the difference being the symptoms don't affect you, but as you are still a carrier, you manage to go to work without loss of pay, and spread it to all the poor bastards who weren't vaccinated, costing them time and wages.

Vaccinations really only work for selfish motives, unless everyone, and I mean everyone, has been vaccinated against the same disease.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Tetsujin]

Jesus did - I quote:
"Look after the shop, I'm just going to grab a pack of cigarettes."

Man, that was almost two thousand years ago... It doesn't sound like you were supposed to be in charge for this long - something must have come up.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Entropius]

Well, not everyone, actually. There are nutjobs in Africa (SA Minister of Health, a few years ago -- not sure if Zuma's stuck in a new one) who believe that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[bruce_the_loon]

We've finally got a bunch in power that accepts the correct medical reasoning behind HIV and AIDS. Ten bloody years late, but they're trying now.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

go blow your nose in a Kleenex.

Facial Tissue.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, good. 'Course, Zuma has his own share of problems... do most South Africans think that the rape charges were false, or are they just ignoring them?

Re:HIV Vaccine

[DriedClexler]

Okay, but if we're just talking about preventative measures, why not just tell people not to have anal sex, which is the primary mode of transmission?

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it means that those people without it in their blood were not infected or even exposed to the virus.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[cayenne8]

Yeah, but, think about it...if you can't get laid the day they cure AIDS...you gotta have something seriously wrong with you!!

Hehee..I can see a lot of guys on the day they cure it, realize they don't have to be monogamous any longer (for fear of death), and say "Honey.....see ya later!!"

Re:HIV Vaccine

[hldn]

yes, the main contributing factor to monogamy today is the fear of aids.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

This implies that there is some other factor at play, possibly something in the genetic makeup of the people who were not infected, which could lead to a universally effective vaccine being developed.

or zombies...

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

"Man! Name-brand word association is one of the more subtle threats to this nation's free trade! It gives the larger, well-known companies an unfair advantage. I'm doing my part to keep the playing field level by weaning people off of referring to generic products with brand names!"

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Philip_the_physicist]

Don't be silly, we all know that AIDS is caused by a virus, but if you have a shower, you'll be fine.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Zebedeu]

something that vaccinated against AIDS would have to be a cure for HIV because people can have HIV for years before they develop AIDS.

Not necessarily. A "cure for AIDS" could simply be something which stops the HIV virus from developing the AIDS simptoms. Meaning you still have the virus, but it's not attacking you.

It's a big difference.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Jaysyn]

Citation Needed.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[promythyus]

and I was just about to say this! too fast dear sir.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

Cure has become a meaningless word anyway

Re:HIV Vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not completely sure I understand your points, but just to add to your idea about something in the genetic makeup. It is well known in the HIV field that certain people are elite controllers (ECs) and can be infected with HIV but maintain very low levels of virus in their blood--no drugs needed. This is due to the types of immune genes they have, namely certain HLAs (B27 and B57, if I remember). One problem is finding these ECs of course because there are no symptoms, and these HLA genes are relatively rare. These particular genes allow their immune cells to present/recognize key viral proteins effectively (capsid) as other HLAs cannot.

There are other genetic components, such as the relatively common deletion to the CD4 receptor, which has led to the idea of putting DeltaCD4 T cells into HIV patients to boost their T cell counts (with some success). But for a vaccine, researchers are very interested in ECs and how they prevent HIV on their own.

Re:HIV Vaccine

[cayenne8]

"yes, the main contributing factor to monogamy today is the fear of aids."

It is for most guys "I" know...

:)

Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[Anonymous Coward]

Formerly known as not successful.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[noundi]

Formerly known as not successful.

I... don't recall the world ever being black and white. I'm pretty sure what you're doing is called "oversimplifying".

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[MBGMorden]

Not at all. What this shows is that the vaccine likely works for some subset of the population. That doesn't mean it doesn't work at all. Viagra for example only works for about 60% of men but people don't go screaming that it doesn't work.

Bottom line here is that vaccine or no, you should still practice safe sex (afterall, HIV isn't the only bad disease lurking around out there). However, if this thing has a ~30% chance of making you immune to the disease with no other ill effects then it's certainly worth reducing your chances by that much.

Basically, to break it down, your chances of getting aids comes down to 3 factors (4 now with this in place):

a * b * c * d

Where
a = the chance that your partner is infected
b = the chance that you catch the disease during an encounter with an infected partner (having intercourse with an infected person doesn't guarantee infection)
c = the chance that your protection fails (only comes into play if you used protection - otherwise it's 100%)
d = the chance that your vaccine was ineffective (only comes into play if you actually got vaccinated - otherwise this is 100%)

Everything that is scientifically proven to reduce the final result, even if it doesn't go to 0% in the end, is a success in my opinion.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[bluefoxlucid]

This is why I like IUD + pill + condom... babies are evil.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot * e

e = the chance that you post on slashdot in which case e is zero

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[FredFredrickson]

Apparently you've never watched old movies. Seriously, color is a recent invention.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[noundi]

Apparently you've never watched old movies. Seriously, color is a recent invention.

If you mean color presume you mean discovery, and if you mean invention I presume you mean color TV. And I hope your world isn't your TV young man.

I... don't recall the world ever being black and white. I'm pretty sure what you're doing is called "oversimplifying".

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[Agthorr]

The great thing about a vaccine, even if imperfect, is it also reduces the chance that your partner is infected (if the vaccine is widely deployed). Picture the graph of how a sexually transmitted disease potentially spreads, where each node is a person and each edge is a sexual encounter. Now make 30% of the nodes immune to the disease. That's enough to protect a large chunk of graph (much more than just the 30% who are immune).

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[DigitalPasture]

This is why I like IUD + pill + condom... babies are evil.

I'm in a long term relationship. Same effect.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[SBrach]

No, the world used to be black and white. I have video and photos that prove it.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[MaerD]

Basically, to break it down, your chances of getting aids comes down to 3 factors (4 now with this in place):

a * b * c * d

Where a = the chance that your partner is infected b = the chance that you catch the disease during an encounter with an infected partner (having intercourse with an infected person doesn't guarantee infection) c = the chance that your protection fails (only comes into play if you used protection - otherwise it's 100%) d = the chance that your vaccine was ineffective (only comes into play if you actually got vaccinated - otherwise this is 100%)

Everything that is scientifically proven to reduce the final result, even if it doesn't go to 0% in the end, is a success in my opinion.

This is the part that makes me question this study.
Specifically, by the factors quoted above:

a) How many of the 16,000 were actually exposed (or know they were exposed)?
b) Even if exposed, it doesn't always mean you catch it during that exposure.
c) How many were using condoms? Any of them that used condoms every time and never had a condom break, they aren't useful for this study.
d) Is untested if your sample doesn't adjust for all of the above and those who simply have not had sex in the time of the study.

And, if you ask people to expose themselves to HIV by not using protection and/or actively seeking exposure, what are the ethical ramifications, especially with regards to those in the control?

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[blankaBrew]

Agreed. They ought to start administering this to the whores.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[amplt1337]

You forgot the vasectomy.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[AndersOSU]

how is it that so few people on slashdot understand the concept of controlled trials.

This trial had a control group - if the control group is infected at a rate that is statistically significantly higher than the test group, the vaccine is at least partially effective with a certain confidence interval.

Use of condoms, exposure rate, etc don't matter if you randomly select your groups and properly blind them.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[ceoyoyo]

I seem to recall shades of gray in old movies.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[gtbritishskull]

I will try to explain this for you. If you have 8000 people in control and 8000 in placebo then you have the same number of people in each group. It is all good. If 200 are exposed to the virus in the first group and 200 in the second group, then you have the same number of people so it is all good. If of those people exposed you have 140 who used condoms correctly each time, you are still all good. You have the same breakdown of people that have the same risk of getting the disease, and the only thing that is different is whether they get the vaccine or not.

This doesn't always work so well in theory, but if you have 16,000 people split into two groups, then you have a pretty low probability of the results being skewed just by chance (that is what confidence interval means by the way).

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[inKubus]

Yep, it didn't come out until the 50's and it was pretty grainy color for a while.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[TooMuchToDo]

Lazy. I just tear the door off a microwave oven, set to popcorn, and stand in front of it with it at the same level as my man bits.

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[Anonymous Coward]

However, if this thing has a ~30% chance of making you immune to the disease with no other ill effects then it's certainly worth reducing your chances by that much.

Context matters; you have to try pretty hard to get infected by HIV in countries like the U.S. and the U.S. has an HIV incidence rate that is 3.5x higher than the next most developed nation.

Condoms and safe sex are the only useful tools until there is a vaccine that is quite a bit more effective (and no, HIV prevention is the stupidest justification for circumcision to date, particularly because it's nonsense).

Re:Vaccine Is Partially Successful

[MBGMorden]

Condoms and safe sex are the only useful tools until there is a vaccine that is quite a bit more effective

That would only be true if condoms and this vaccine were mutually exclusive. Sure a condom does a lot more to reduce your chances, but you don't have to choose one or the other. Condoms can and do fail. Having yet another chance to dodge that bullet when they do doesn't hurt a thing.

This should have had the Apple logo by it.

[Anonymous Coward]

There you go Mac users! You can have it without worrying about AIDS!

No hurry

[4D6963]

Cool! Hopefully by the time I become sexually active it will have improved much more!

Re:No hurry

[Ingcuervo]

of course, it is obvious that when you get sexually active it should be a lot better, because if you usually stay around /. probably you will become sexually active when microsoft release windows 22, bug free edition!!!!!!!!

Re:No hurry

[kimvette]

Most slashdotters won't have anything to worry about either way. Playing warcraft and evercrack while stuffing your cheese hole with doritos, cheetos, and coke all night every night is a great preventative measure against major HIV risk factors. ;)

Re:No hurry

[martas]

I suppose when exactly that happens depends on your karma... get it? like, not in this life? funny, right?!

Re:No hurry

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the sun becoming a red giant will kill you first.

Re:No hurry

[mcgrew]

Cool! Hopefully by the time I become sexually active it will have improved much more!

How I pity you young folks that never lived through the '70s. It was a GREAT time to be a nerd. Nerds were still paraihs, but hippies were "cool", and all a nerd had to do to become a hippie was to stop getting haircuts, buy a new pair of glasses, and throw away the pocket protectors. Birth control was cheap and effective, abortions had been legalized by the SCOTUS, and there were no STDs that couldn't be cured with a shot of pennicillin.

It was the only decade in my life (maybe in history) where strange women would walk up and say "wanna fuck?" without wanting you to buy her twenty dollars worth of crack.

Aids killed all that. God but I miss the seventies!

Re:No hurry

[4D6963]

Unless my balls becoming blue giants kill me before that.

Re:No hurry

[rivetgeek]

As a middle class white male non IV-drug user, statistically speaking, you are far more likely to hit a hole in one in golf than to catch HIV in the United States. Its something like .04% per incident with a known carrier if you're male and having vaginal sex.

Re:No hurry

[Thanshin]

I suppose when exactly that happens depends on your karma... get it? like, not in this life? funny, right?!

You must be an american script writer.

Re:No hurry

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes - Thank you and the rest of your generation for your contribution to the epidemic.

Re:No hurry

[icebrain]

you are far more likely to hit a hole in one in golf than to catch HIV in the United States

So as long as I don't play golf, I'm ok, right?

Re:No hurry

[martas]

sorry, wrong on all accounts... well, i've been known to write a script or two, i suppose, but they weren't for actors, they were for bash.

Re:No hurry

[flink]

... and there were no STDs that couldn't be cured with a shot of pennicillin.

Right, because herpes and HPV didn't exist until 1980 :P

Re:No hurry

[rubycodez]

all then there is all this talk of "it's not a gay disease", yes it is, unprotected homosexual ass sex more than anything else is largely responsible for bringing the disease into the population and even the rise in HIV infections in women is mostly from men who also do gay sex

The truth: AIDS, the gay disease, spread by homosexual anal sex.

Re:No hurry

[rivetgeek]

http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=102240544.html there are several different figures given by different studies, but the highest Ive seen was .4 Most studies give a figure >.01

Re:No hurry

[rivetgeek]

Uh no, heterosexual anal sex carries the EXACT SAME RISK with a known infected partner. But hey, way to be a bigot. Anal sex in general is far more risky as the vagina is an acidic environment that is hostile to the virus, plus microtears can occur int he rectum walls during anal sex that creates a better blood pathway.

Re:No hurry

[mcgrew]

According to Wikipedia, HPV can be contracted without sex, so it's hardly an STD. The same goes for herpes.

You might as well call the common cold an STD, you can catch that through sex, too.

Re:No hurry

[Thaelon]

But....the hair..

They don't call it a "70's bush" for no reason.

Re:No hurry

[rohan972]

As I understand it (not very well since HIV transmission is not a topic that interests me much) it would be the combination of microtears and ejaculating inside the anus that produces the increased risk of transmission. If that is correct (it may not be) then it is receiving anal sex from an infected male partner that carries high risk, regardless of the gender of the receiver. However, only a male who gets infected can then infect someone the same manner as the woman will not be ejaculating in another partners anus. Under those assumptions homosexual anal sex will indeed be riskier, that is it will spread the disease through a population faster and more easily, than heterosexual sex. If giving anal sex to an infected parter carries the same risk as receiving then that would not be so.

That is no more bigotry than it is to say that heterosexual sex carries a higher risk of pregnancy.

Re:No hurry

[rivetgeek]

Most gay males do not both give and receive

Re:No hurry

[TheRaven64]

You can catch HIV though other vectors too (anything that involves exchange of body fluids, but most especially blood transfer), but it is still generally referred to as an STD.

Re:No hurry

[rohan972]

Fair enough, as I said:
If that is correct (it may not be)

I do know that incidence of HIV is predominantly among homosexuals in my country, but I don't have any evidence to say why that is and I certainly wouldn't see it as a reason to have heterosexual sex unprotected.

Re:No hurry

[rivetgeek]

It is predominant among homosexuals but that is more likely cultural than biological. Many gay men participate in far more casual and unprotected anal sex or other high risk practices. It's not becase it's two men though, it's because those two men happen to be having high risk sex. If heteros were doing the exact same acts with the same frequency, you'd see a similar infection rate.

Re:No hurry

[LionMage]

Thank you and the rest of your generation for your contribution to the epidemic.

Only the people who were actually infected contributed to the epidemic, so blaming the GP and his entire generation is a bit of an overstatement. Besides, he's talking about the 1970s; we now know that the virus may have originated as early as the late 19th century, or the early 20th century. The promiscuity of the 1970s was what it was, and certainly did contribute to the spread of many infectious agents, but recall that the main explosion of unprotected sex happened in the heterosexual population due to the introduction of birth control pills. Male-to-female transmission rates of HIV are pretty low, and female-to-female rates are even lower. That leaves the male-to-male group, which wouldn't be affected so much by the advent of the birth control pill...

I will also note that it wasn't until the 1980s that gay activists were seriously promoting safer sex practices such as ubiquitous condom use, something that was actively resisted by many in the gay community at first. (Some of that was fighting the "condoms are only for preventing pregnancy" myth, I would imagine, while others groused about the lack of freedom and spontaneity, etc. I met a few in the latter category, some of whom were convinced the whole thing was a conspiracy to eradicate gay identity.)

Re:No hurry

[Anonymous Coward]

Has Mr Bill Hicks take on when there is a cure for AIDS been posted yet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdrcOGoszlE

Re:No hurry

[Anonymous Coward]

There, there... Now you're just talking through your AIDS hole...

Re:No hurry

[MartinSchou]

I was filling out one of those sheets at one time (donating blood) and came across this question for men:
"Have you ever engaged in homosexual anal sex ?"

When I asked the nurse, where on the form I should make a note that I've had unprotected anal sex with 1,500 different women she didn't quite know what to say.

Apparently it's only a problem if a guy fucks another guy in the ass.

Somewhat similar with the questions on visiting prostitutes. If you've been a user within the last 12 months, that's bad. If you've ever at one point in your life been paid to have sex with someone (and if you want to get technical, I consider free drinks payment), you can't ever donate, but on that one at least they don't make an obvious discrimination against gender.

Re:No hurry

[rubycodez]

I totally agree with you that anal sex doesn't distinguish between sexual orientation, risks are the same. But what group does it statistically more often, homosexual or heterosexual? Fact is most women do not do it, and most who try it do not enjoy it.

So you accuse someone who points out reality as a bigot?

Maybe I was just suggesting that everyone should practice safe sex, especially in the more risky activities, and things would be better?

Re:No hurry

[rivetgeek]

You know very little about gay men, obviously. The vast majority do NOT engage in anal sex.

Re:No hurry

[trytoguess]

Uh huh... The disease is assumed to have originated in non-human primates in sub-Sahara Africa, and later jumped species because people ate bush meat. Yea, that country. Not exactly known for it's hospitality towards deviant sexuality.

You are correct. Gay (but not lesbian) sex is the riskiest way to get HIV. But really now heterosexuals make up at least 90% of the population, and having any sex puts you at substantial risk. It's not a gay disease any more than say... being fat is a gaming problem.

Re:No hurry

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, claim an incurable disease is the fault of 5-10% of the population. That's totally a generic call for safer sex practices all around...

Incidentally, all crackers are geeks. I don't know why people deny it. Crackers are a geek problem.

Re:No hurry

[mcgrew]

It seemed normal then. I can't get used to the extremely short hair on some women these days. And there are still guys with extremely long hair, I was talking to a 27 year old construction worker in the bar just last night who had a ponytail almost to his waist.

Re:No hurry

[rubycodez]

hahaha, what planet do you live on. Well known statistic, 75% of them do. maybe you are part of the 25% that do something else?

Re:No hurry

[kaen]

Only if you have sex as much as you golf.

Re:No hurry

[Anonymous Coward]

the vagina is an acidic environment that is hostile

Yep. I'd wager that most gay men would agree with that assessment.

Scary clinical trial

[Anonymous Coward]

Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the armyâ(TM)s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos. They then got regular tests for the AIDS virus for three years. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did.

Wait, wait, wait. Did they go through the random distribution of people who may get aids? Clearly they did not just infect people with aids afterwards. The only way I can think of them getting these rates is that when someone tested positive for aids who was not in the trial noted their previous partners, then that partner list was cross-referenced with the vaccinated.

Hm, I guess the other way would be if someone who had the vaccine was told by one of their partners that they were infected and that they should get themselves checked.

Regardless, there has to be a significant margin of error on their estimates thanks to AIDS reporting and such.

Re:Scary clinical trial

[MightyMartian]

This seems a bit overhyped to me, and doesn't really seem like a well-run clinical trial. It may be something of a first step, but if it is, there's still a long way to go.

Re:Scary clinical trial

[ArsenneLupin]

They had a control group who got a placebo instead of the real vaccine, and compared the infection rates of both. Both groups were drawn from the same demographics. So no need to interview partners, compensate for riskier behavior due to being "protected", etc.

Re:Scary clinical trial

[tomtomtom]

No, they just went to a population where HIV is already relatively common and a large number of people don't usually take adequate precautions against it (i.e. use condoms) and then studied the effects of the vaccine on that population's total infection rate over time. It's not the greatest way to test this (since you have no way to tell if it's just down to random variations in the two population's levels of exposure) but doing it properly (i.e. deliverately exposing people) is pretty unethical to say the least.

Of course, you can also test the vaccine on animal models which are deliberately exposed to HIV so we know there's a good chance it will be effective if the population study then shows these kinds of results to corroborate it.

Ultimately one of the purposes of drug trials is also to look at side-effects. Assuming the side-effects of this vaccine weren't too bad, with that kind of effectiveness rate it would seem this stands a reasonable chance of widespread deployment, in which case it'll be possible to gather more data.

Re:Scary clinical trial

[Anonymous Coward]

They had a control group who got a placebo instead of the real vaccine, and compared the infection rates of both. Both groups were drawn from the same demographics. So no need to interview partners, compensate for riskier behavior due to being "protected", etc.

The Straight Dope Aids odds

From there on out, statistically speaking, things deteriorate pretty fast. If your partner is HIV-positive, your chances of getting AIDS after one night are 1 in 5,000 with a condom, 1 in 500 without. Have sex with an HIV-positive partner 500 times using condoms and your chances escalate to 1 in 11. Skip the gift wrap and they're 2 in 3.

Because there is not a 100% chance of getting aids from unprotected sex, and that the numbers are quite close (a difference of 20)... I have to question the numbers. Everyone who had unprotected sex (From either the placebo or vaccine group) had a 1 in 500 dice roll of not getting aids from one encounter.

See what I'm getting at? How do we know that the aids infected people wern't just part of the standard of deviation?

Re:Scary clinical trial

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

This seems a bit overhyped to me, and doesn't really seem like a well-run clinical trial. It may be something of a first step, but if it is, there's still a long way to go.

Well of course - the /best/ trial would be to inject volunteers who received both the placebo and teh vaccine with HIV. Unfortunately, that's not really an option...

Re:Scary clinical trial

[Entropius]

Because the people who did the trial asked "what is the probability that the difference in infection rates is due to dumb luck rather than any effect of our vaccine", and mathematicians have been studying how to ask this question in a rigorous way for a long damn time.

Re:Scary clinical trial

[johncadengo]

No, they just went to a population where HIV is already relatively common and a large number of people don't usually take adequate precautions against it (i.e. use condoms) and then studied the effects of the vaccine on that population's total infection rate over time.

How do you know? I RTFA, and I don't see it mention their procedures anywhere.

Are you sure they didn't expose these people to HIV as part of the trial? Then these statistics seem even more dubious, no?

I'm a bit confused. How do they conduct these trials and how do they make sure they are accurate?

Re:Scary clinical trial

[tomtomtom]

No, they just went to a population where HIV is already relatively common and a large number of people don't usually take adequate precautions against it (i.e. use condoms) and then studied the effects of the vaccine on that population's total infection rate over time.

How do you know? I RTFA, and I don't see it mention their procedures anywhere.

It's been reported fairly widely elsewhere. See, e.g., this article from the BBC:

The researchers had sought HIV-negative men and women between the ages of 18 and 30 years old who were at an average risk of infection.

...

From 2003 to 2006, half of the volunteers received the vaccine, and the other half a placebo. Those taking part never learnt which one they had been given. After that, the volunteers received an HIV test every six months for the next three years. Of those who took the dummy injection, 74 of 8,198 volunteers became infected, compared with 51 of 8,197 who took the vaccine.

All volunteers had received counselling on how to prevent infection throughout the trial, and those who became infected were given free access to HIV care and treatment. Two people have since died.

Inspiring....

[Zantac69]

...but their conclusions.

How in the hell could you ever do a controlled experiment like this on people if you dont control their exposure to the infection causing material? The only way you can determind improvements of real thing over placebo is if you intentionally expose the test subjects to the virus...which would be a death sentence.

Their results could mean that the group recieving the test vaccine came into contact with the virus 31.2% less.

Re:Inspiring....

[wstrucke]

I was thinking the same thing. If they weren't tracking and testing all sexual partners I do not understand how they could come up with any statistically valid result. It seems that they are making a lot of assumptions as to the common behavior of all of the subjects. Considering how small of a percentage actually became infected (51 out of 8000 is about half a percent), I don't see how any assumptions could "even out" with the sample pool.

This news is certainly exciting, but IMO it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Re:Inspiring....

[gazbo]

If you managed to accidentally partition 16,402 people such that one group was exposed 31.2% less than the other, I think you could count yourself as "fairly unlucky".

Re:Inspiring....

[Bovius]

That means 68.8% of their test subjects got a terminal disease. Those don't sound like very good odds to me.

I know that that conclusion is erroneous, I just like the idea of these guys giving a bunch of people the vaccine and then trying to give them AIDS. For science!

Re:Inspiring....

[Pulzar]

How in the hell could you ever do a controlled experiment like this on people if you dont control their exposure to the infection causing material? The only way you can determind improvements of real thing over placebo is if you intentionally expose the test subjects to the virus...which would be a death sentence.

Everybody was already exposed to the virus. For those that got the vaccine, there was a 30% less chance of it turning into AIDS.

The vaccine successfully prevented HIV turning into AIDS in some number of people, basically. It didn't stop people from getting HIV.

Re:Inspiring....

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Well, if you only accepted individuals that engaged in high risk behaviors and stated that they had no intention of stopping their behavior, then it might be more accurate.

Re:Inspiring....

[4D6963]

Their results could mean that the group recieving the test vaccine came into contact with the virus 31.2% less.

And how the fuck would that work? They're random groups, no one knows who got what. That means anyone is still as likely to get in contact with HIV. If you took two groups and gave them both placebo then you might have something like 75 in on and 70 in the other, cause that's the kind of margin the randomness allows for. 74 and 51 clearly means that it's something the vaccine does.

Re:Inspiring....

[modmans2ndcoming]

here is how:

1)get the infection rate of the population
2)take a random sample from the population
3)do a double blind study of the vaccine
4)at the end of x years, compare the rate of infection of both your experimental group and your control group. If the control group is with in the statistical bounds of the population infection rate and the experimental group's infection rate is below that rate at a statisticaly significant level, then you can conclude the vaccine has a positive impact on infection rates.

Re:Inspiring....

[4D6963]

Wow, I already knew that people on Slashdot had a very tenuous understanding on economic or scientific topics, but damn, most of you have an awfully tenuous grasp of statistics too!

If they weren't tracking and testing all sexual partners I do not understand how they could come up with any statistically valid result.

Why would they need to track anyone? People are still going to do what it takes to catch HIV in the same way in both groups. Why would you want one group to catch HIV more than the other, besides for what randomness allows?

it should be taken with a grain of salt.

If it should, then it's not for the reasons you're thinking of.

Re:Inspiring....

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason is.... randomness! Assuming that the groups were selected randomly then the results hold. You may point out, "Well, isn't it possible that all the people who were put in the vaccine group just didn't participate in risky activities?" The answer is of course it is possible, but if the groups were assigned randomly the chance of that happening is built into the result.

As long as the group assignments were truly random and they didn't treat the people in the two groups differently after they were assigned then I would expect that you would see similar results if this experiment were repeated.

Re:Inspiring....

[LotsOfPhil]

The troubling thing is that the ones who got the vaccine and were infected were just as sick as those who got a placebo. The vaccination should have slowed the progress of the disease in the cases were it didn't prevent it. Or so one would think/hope.

Re:Inspiring....

[Harlan879]

Not necessarily. HIV works by aikido-ing the immune system. It could be that the vaccine could either fully prevent infection or fully fail to prevent infection. Once the virus becomes established in immune cells, the presence of the vaccine and an immune response might be totally insignificant to the progress of the infection.

Re:Inspiring....

[sdpuppy]

Hopefully they got some cake as well.

Re:Inspiring....

[plague3106]

Well, that could be... but that's why the people were random and from roughly the same demographics and I assume are sexually active. The idea is that all 16,000 are just as likely to get HIV (which, not really knowing much else, is a valid assumption), so the fact that the vacinated people turned up with HIV 31% less than the other group is significant.

Re:Inspiring....

[Artifakt]

You mean, as in all the air in your room jumps to one side and you do a total recall impersonation before it jumps back = 'fairly unlucky'.

Re:Inspiring....

[samkass]

Your comment is the exact opposite of true. This vaccine offered a 30% less chance of acquiring HIV, but once acquired offered no protection against AIDS. It's the first vaccine trial ever to show efficacy against HIV infection, but had no effect on HIV levels in the blood in the infected. All participants started HIV-negative.

I think you need to re-read the article.

Re:Inspiring....

[wstrucke]

Wow, I already knew that people on Slashdot had a very tenuous understanding on economic or scientific topics, but damn, most of you have an awfully tenuous grasp of statistics too! ...If it should, then it's not for the reasons you're thinking of.

Perhaps you could enlighten us with your genius. God forbid anyone has an opinion who doesn't have a PhD, right?

If you open your eyes and ears, some of the best ideas can come from people who sound like they don't know what they are talking about. No, I'm not going to go looking for examples for you, but I've seen enough idiots with advanced degrees on the news and the internet to realize it's prudent to listen to people who have something to say and not judge so quickly.

Yes, I responded with enough haste that I didn't stop to think of everyone who would be offended by my lack of statistics training. My sincerest apologies.

Re:Inspiring....

[jacks0n]

There were 16000 test subjects, and only 74+51 =125 contracted the disease. 125/16000=.0078. 0.78% =/= 68.8%

This is less than the 0.93% we could apparently have expected from this self selected population of volunteers, which is understandably less than we would expect from a truly random selection of non-volunteers; volunteers on average probably being more aware of the risks than non-volunteers.

Re:Inspiring....

[evanbd]

Specifically, you could say you were unlucky at the 5% chance level -- that's the (approximate) odds of getting results more extreme than this, given the number of people in each group that actually got infected, purely by dumb luck, if the vaccine did exactly nothing. (74 vs 51, out of a total of 16402, broken into two groups; that's just using a poisson approximation, since I don't have the precise group sizes, which gives 2.06 standard deviations, or significant at the 5% level.)

Re:Inspiring....

[4D6963]

Perhaps you could enlighten us with your genius.

Read my other comments, they're sufficiently redundant with each other, I'm not repeating myself once again.

Re:Inspiring....

[david_thornley]

Doctorates aren't necessary, but it's nice when people have opinions about subjects they know about.

Some of the best ideas come from outside the formal experts, true, but they tend to come from people who know the field anyway. Einstein revolutionized physics the year he got promoted to Patent Technician, Second Class, but he knew a whole lot of physics and followed the current research.

As to why different levels of exposure don't invalidate the test, think about it. Exposure is just only one of the many factors that go into determining whether somebody will get infected with HIV (although it is pretty important that there be some), and statistics is good at handling multiple random factors. In this case, exposure may have varied between the two groups, but there's no reason to think there was any systematic variance. Therefore, it's just one more random factor. The important thing is that the difference in infection rates was statistically significant, despite random factors like amount of exposure, general health, nutrition, and the like.

It would have been useful to know the exposure levels. It would have eliminated an important random factor and made it possible to get more definite results with a lot fewer people involved. Say, take the 3-digit and below Slashdotters, since we know they can't have STDs, and expose them all by giving them an opportunity to have sex with another person, who we know to be infected. That would likely have given us more certainty.

Remember also that this is one experiment. There's a few percent chance that the results are all due to chance, and so researchers will need to repeat experiments with this vaccine. (There's also the fact that, given 20 random vaccines that don't actually work, you'd have roughly a 75% chance to get a statistically significant result by chance alone.)

And, if it helps, lots of people don't understand statistics. I saw a survey once of psychology papers that concluded that about 10% of them made major statistical errors.

Re:Inspiring....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but he didn't say coincidence. Maybe the 'vaccine' actually just causes erectile dysfunction.

Re:Inspiring....

[Anonymous Coward]

nowhere it says this was a double-blind experiment, hence "luck" may not be the only thing at play

Re:Inspiring....

[Anonymous Coward]

> prop.test(c(51,74),c(8202,8202),alternative="two.sided")

        2-sample test for equality of proportions with continuity correction

data: c(51, 74) out of c(8202, 8202)
X-squared = 3.9017, df = 1, p-value = 0.04824
alternative hypothesis: two.sided
95 percent confidence interval:
  -5.587244e-03 -2.114406e-05
sample estimates:
          prop 1 prop 2
0.006217996 0.009022190

> prop.test(c(51,74),c(8202,8202),alternative="less")

        2-sample test for equality of proportions with continuity correction

data: c(51, 74) out of c(8202, 8202)
X-squared = 3.9017, df = 1, p-value = 0.02412
alternative hypothesis: less
95 percent confidence interval:
  -1.0000000000 -0.0004489831
sample estimates:
          prop 1 prop 2
0.006217996 0.009022190

Re:Inspiring....

[evanbd]

The two-sided test is appropriate here; we can't completely ignore the idea that the vaccine might have made things worse.

We don't know for sure that the two groups are precisely evenly split; we expect that they're close, but not precise, because some people will have dropped out of the study for one reason or another.

I'd say that confirms that my estimate of 5% was reasonable ;)

News for Nerds ?

[alexhs]

How is that news for nerds ?

None of us will ever get laid, so that's not stuff that matters...

</cliché>

Re:News for Nerds ?

[palegray.net]

Funny, but you forgot about blood transfusions. While it's extremely rare for contaminated blood to be used in the U.S. and many other western nations, it's a very real possibility for a lot of the world.

Re:News for Nerds ?

[TheRaven64]

HIV can be sexually transmitted, but it's also transmitted via blood transfusions and a few other mechanisms. Even nerds get blood transfusions. Some nerds work in hospitals and so are exposed to the virus on a regular basis, and an accident with a needle can cause infection.

Re:News for Nerds ?

[selven]

And dirty needles (both medical and illicit). And getting into a fight with someone where some blood splatters onto your wound. And being deliberately poisoned for whatever reason.

Re:News for Nerds ?

[martas]

yeah, but it doesn't mean it can't satisfy our perpetual hunger for coolness and excitement from things that have nothing to do whatsoever with our own lives, at least in the foreseeable future. just like news on quantum computers, or some new concept for a space elevator, or some new metamaterial that maybe possibly will allow moore's law to continue holding in a distant, hypothetical future.

i'm just sayin'...

Re:News for Nerds ?

[geekoid]

And drunk women.

Re:News for Nerds ?

[uberjoe]

*thumbs up* Zombie Issac Asimov likes this.

Re:News for Nerds ?

[ca111a]

Don't you see?! Now there one less reason to be afraid of sex!

Re:News for Nerds ?

[jimbolauski]

Because you can get aids from the toilet seat, come on everybody knows that.

Effectiveness

[LightPhoenix7]

While this is excellent news, and intriguing scientifically, an effectiveness of 31.8% is practically useless in vaccinating a population. Typically you need at least 70% of your population (varies based on virus) vaccinated before you start to see the effects of herd immunity. Even if they vaccinated everyone in Thailand, you wouldn't get this effect.

Furthermore, the low effectiveness is actually a liability; the end result could be mutations in the HIV virus that make it immune to the vaccine. This is part of the reason why the influenza vaccine has limited effectiveness - influenza, like HIV, has a tendency to mutate quickly. If a new strain comes along, like H1N1 for influenza, you're defenseless.

Finally, I think there's a problem with how the vaccine will be perceived. If the vaccine is only 30% effective, I think people will see that as being too risky to even get the shot. There's already (too much IMO) FUD out there against vaccines in general. If you think that you can get influenza from the flu vaccine, there's a strong aversion to taking the HIV vaccine. For a 30% chance at being immune, that's no good. If it were 100%, that would be a totally different story.

Re:Effectiveness

[Lord Ender]

False dichotomy. You are simply wrong when you say anything but herd immunity is useless. The people who don't die of AIDS thanks to this vaccine would very much disagree with you.

Re:Effectiveness

[gclef]

Ye, gods, if ever there was a comment that needs an RTFA, it's yours.

There are two direct quotes in the article that make it clear this is not a vaccine that will ever be made available to the public because it's not effective enough. The story here is that a vaccine with statistically interesting effectiveness is *possible*. We weren't even sure that one was up till now.

Re:Effectiveness

[felipekk]

I think the big deal here is that they were able to create something that has an effectiveness greater than 0.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but I guess it's easier to go up from 30% effective than from 0% effective.

Re:Effectiveness

[zolltron]

I think there is one other problem as well. When you have a vaccine that isn't 100% effective, at least a subset of the population might treat it as if it was 100%. People might engage in more risky behaviors assuming that they're immune. If you take the full effect of a vaccine into account, it might even cause an *increase* in HIV.

Hopefully this is just a step to a better vaccine.

Re:Effectiveness

[TheRaven64]

The big news is that it appears to be either 100% effective or 0% effective for any given person. Most vaccines that aren't 100% effective on everyone stimulate the immune system enough to weaken the virus, but not kill it outright. In this case, it isn't doing that. It's either stimulating immune system enough to convey immunity, or it's having no effect at all[1]. This means that there is some other factor that is interacting with the vaccine. If that can be isolated then it may be possible to produce a 100% effective vaccine. Even if it can't, it should give some extra insight into how HIV (and related viruses) work, which can have long-term effects on the development of antivirals. So, all in all, an interesting result.

[1] Apparently. As other posters have pointed out, there is a 5% chance that this is just a fluke.

Re:Effectiveness

[TheLink]

> The big news is that it appears to be either 100% effective or 0% effective for any given person

Not necessarily. The vaccine could just reduce your odds of getting HIV but still not make you 100% safe from HIV. It's like seat belts improving your survivability while not protecting you 100%.

It's not as if they proceeded to take a random sample of both populations (that don't already have HIV), inject them with HIV over a course of a few months and see what percentage are near 100% immune.

Heck, maybe the vaccine made people feel like having less sex, or had some other effect. ;)

FINALLY!

[chiqui13]

, let's hope that this discovery will really serve its purpose..maybe the next one would be a final cure... Samsung LED TV

Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Geoffrey.landis]

someone do some analysis on the statistics and tell us all something and get +5

Sure. It's Poisson statistics, so the standard deviation is the square root of the count.
placebo: 74 plus or minus 8.6
vaccine: 51 plus or minus 7.1

The statistical significance of the difference (23) is equal to the standard deviation of the sum (not the difference!) of the counts, so:

difference between placebo and vaccine:
23 (=31%) plus or minus 11
= (2.06 standard deviations)

Assuming they set their criteria for statistical significance at two standard deviations, then they are significant.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Harlan879]

Yes, although there's an issue of multiple comparisons. There have been a fair number of HIV vaccine trials over the years. This is the first that's found statistically significant results. But if you were to test 20 different non-effective vaccines at a 5% significance level, you'd expect one of the tests to be significant just by chance. This is certainly an intriguing result, but it could be an outlier, and must be replicated.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

When was the last time you heard of a study where the resutls weren't statistically significant. At this point, I ask whether the property of statistical significance is itself statistically significant.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Anonymous Coward]

While your analysis is correct it is actually an approximation since a Poisson distribution is not Gaussian. This particular problem actually has it's own set of exact statistical tests; for a reference see here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2289537?cookieSet=1

Using a two-tailed Liddell's Exact test the significance is p=0.039 (assuming 8000 people in each group).

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[oldhack]

I feel farty so I'll let it out.

A primary assumption in your analysis is that the underlying phenomena is correctly represented with a poisson distribution. It may be a good assumption, but I am sure it's still arguable. This is one of the reasons why employing stats is a bitch.

Sorry for the stink.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[sonnejw0]

Yes, there is a statistical significance between the groups in the study, but not among the population of Thailand. Of the 64,000,000 people in the population of Thailand, 1.5% have HIV.
This study used 16,000 volunteers within the population. Only 125 got HIV? That's less than half the rate within the population. I think we need to know more about the subjects in the study to know more about the value of these results. I had no idea there was a 50% placebo effect in HIV treatment!

What I find most interesting is that the HIV viral load was identical between the two groups. You would think that a vaccine would not just prevent HIV, but lower the amount of the virus in the blood. All in all, I find it a confusing study and one worth a good "hmmm" but nothing more until we get follow-up studies or more information about the subjects and groupings.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[phoenix321]

Of course there is a rather large placebo effect in HIV vaccine trials: the free education every participant will probably get.

As HIV is probably the only disease that you can be completely avoided by rather small changes in habits and behavior, a 50 percent lower infection rate by simple education seems plausible enough. It's only 50%, because the participants also have wives or husbands that they thought were faithful AND probably did not undergo the same education.

The same viral load *could* mean that the infected people in the trial group were immune against one strain and vulnerable against the other, hence the second strain can replicate as usual while the other had no chance for infection.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[droptone]

Then look at effect sizes if you're worried about gaming statistical significance due to sample size. If you're worried about the file drawer problem, then you're welcome to Google around to see if there are any other trials involving the two drugs used (vCP1521 and AIDSVAX B/E). A search of the US gubment's page on clinical trials reveals none. Also realize, that the big journals require that a study that seeks to be published was registered beforehand, and I cannot imagine that an AIDS vaccine study will be taken seriously if it isn't published in one of the major journals. Though there are issues with this process, it does allow for a systematic review of publication bias rather than a vague reference that is meant to undermine the legitimacy of research.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[jacks0n]

and 2 sigma ~= 95% (assumes gaussian as someone noted, but usually is a reasonable approximation)
This is a very typical confidence level for reporting data. (the next typical level up being 3 sigma or ~ 99.7%.)

It means there is a 5% chance the difference is purely accidental.

That's exactly what was reported on the BBC this morning.

As an aside, why doesn't the summary give credit to the people actually leading this study?- namely the US Army.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[AvitarX]

Did they not start with people that were known to not have it?

Considering it is an illness that lasts for quite a while, I wouldn't expect the sample to match the population at the end of the trial.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[AndersOSU]

(a) both groups received education, counseling and condoms - that alone reduces infection rate
(b) 1.5% of Thais contracted HIV sometime in the last 30 years. This study lasted three years. Presumably, had the study run for a decade the control groups infection rate would have approached the national average, i.e going from ~1% to ~1.5% (again correcting for education, counseling, and condoms.)

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[SEAL]

Good thing I was successful in my Probability and Statistics class. I scored 31.2% on the final so I totally understood that.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[B4D BE4T]

How does this account for the number of people in each group who were actually exposed to HIV? I admit I'm pretty bad with statistics, but after reading the article and some of the statistics discussions here, I still don't understand how the study accounts for this. Could it be that more people in the placebo group were exposed to the virus than in the vaccine group and, if so, wouldn't this account for the larger number of people who became infected in the placebo group?

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[NiteShaed]

Poisson statistics?

Sounds fishy to me......

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[geekoid]

You don't here of those studies becasue they don't ahve anything to say. What every they where doing the study on failed to find anything.

The exception is people touting out bad studies to tout there alternative systems and bilk peple for money.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[geekoid]

This is a first study. Since statical significant difference were found, they will go into another test.

This is normal. Do a test, then control more variable tighter, do it again. It's its an error in the study, it will weed itself out.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[gtbritishskull]

That is why they do the study with a large group of people. If you separate the people into groups randomly, then it becomes extremely unlikely that the groups will have a significantly higher percentage of a certain type of people than another. But they will probably do this study again, with a larger group of people, to make sure that this was not a fluke. So, it is possible that the placebo group was just more exposed to the virus, but not likely.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[ceoyoyo]

clinicaltrials.gov

Enjoy.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea there was a 50% placebo effect in HIV treatment!

From a different (BBC) article:

"Half of the volunteers were given the vaccine, while the other half were given a placebo - and all were given counselling on HIV/Aids prevention." (emphasis mine)

The counselling could have something to do with it.

Source:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8272113.stm

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Crysm]

I read a sociology paper recently. It was very clear about what answers it was trying to find and whether or not each point was or was not significant. Many points were significant; many were not. Even if every point had come back as not being statistically significant, that doesn't mean it has nothing useful to say. It just says that Group X is not very different from the Control group for whatever parameter was being measured. (Although if every point came back negative, something would probably be seriously wrong with either the initial assumptions or the statistical analysis itself...)

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[TooMuchToDo]

Thanks!

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Geoffrey.landis]

Yes, although there's an issue of multiple comparisons. There have been a fair number of HIV vaccine trials over the years. This is the first that's found statistically significant results. But if you were to test 20 different non-effective vaccines at a 5% significance level, you'd expect one of the tests to be significant just by chance. This is certainly an intriguing result, but it could be an outlier, and must be replicated.

Good point.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Geoffrey.landis]

Good thing I was successful in my Probability and Statistics class. I scored 31.2% on the final so I totally understood that.

Yes, but how well did the control score?

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Sir,

what you just wrote is utterly wrong.
The correct analysis is that of a proportion testing or a chi-squared. A more valid analysis would be the one below in the statistical programming language R.

> prop.test(c(51,74),c(8202,8202),alternative="two.sided")

        2-sample test for equality of proportions with continuity correction

data: c(51, 74) out of c(8202, 8202)
X-squared = 3.9017, df = 1, p-value = 0.04824
alternative hypothesis: two.sided
95 percent confidence interval:
  -5.587244e-03 -2.114406e-05
sample estimates:
          prop 1 prop 2
0.006217996 0.009022190

> prop.test(c(51,74),c(8202,8202),alternative="less")

        2-sample test for equality of proportions with continuity correction

data: c(51, 74) out of c(8202, 8202)
X-squared = 3.9017, df = 1, p-value = 0.02412
alternative hypothesis: less
95 percent confidence interval:
  -1.0000000000 -0.0004489831
sample estimates:
          prop 1 prop 2
0.006217996 0.009022190

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there is a statistical significance between the groups in the study, but not among the population of Thailand. Of the 64,000,000 people in the population of Thailand, 1.5% have HIV.
This study used 16,000 volunteers within the population. Only 125 got HIV? That's less than half the rate within the population. I think we need to know more about the subjects in the study to know more about the value of these results. I had no idea there was a 50% placebo effect in HIV treatment!

The trial was run for a fixed amount of time. The subjects may not have enough time to reach the larger population level of infection.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong. Very wrong. You should really talk to a statistician. Clinical trails use peer-reviewed methods of determining statistical significance. YOU DONT HAVE TO REPEAT A TRIAL to demonstrate this. That would be absurd.

According to your logic, 1 in 20 drugs on the market actually don't work. This is why there is a clinical trial PROCESS, of which this study was just one piece. The drug would not have seen the light of day without undergoing previous studies that demonstrated some degree of efficacy.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for running the number. The media, even NYT, is utter crap for reporting on science.

Definition of "statistical significance" is arbitrary. How many trials have been done on difference vaccine candidates? I'd guess more than 20. So the fact one of them has shown 2 standards deviations is basically a.... **YAWN** One of those trials was bound to be "significant."

I'll bet 10/1 odds that if they do a followup on this vaccine combo the "significance" doesn't hold, because this was just by chance, and possibly human motivated "error".

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Geoffrey.landis]

You're wrong. Very wrong. You should really talk to a statistician. Clinical trails use peer-reviewed methods of determining statistical significance. YOU DONT HAVE TO REPEAT A TRIAL to demonstrate this. That would be absurd.

Unfortunately, what you say is not true. You should talk to a statistician. The original reply was correct: if you do a lot of tests, randomly some of them will show false positives at levels of a few standard deviations. This is not news to people who understand statistics.

Two standard deviations is only on the edge of significance-- this one really does need to be confirmed before we believe it.

And, in fact, your statement is generally untrue: replication of results is at the heart of real science.

According to your logic, 1 in 20 drugs on the market actually don't work.

Of the drugs that have had only one clinical trial? That's probably about right.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there is a statistical significance between the groups in the study, but not among the population of Thailand. Of the 64,000,000 people in the population of Thailand, 1.5% have HIV.
This study used 16,000 volunteers within the population. Only 125 got HIV? That's less than half the rate within the population.

You're confusing rate and prevalence. The study did not follow them their whole lives. No doubt if they'd run it 5 years more that 125 number would have been bigger.

Re:Statistics [Re:Lulz]

[moosesocks]

Which is exactly why we use control groups.

New Vaccine prevents Card Accidents!

[osomoore]

I have a new test for a vaccine that prevents car accidents! I'll inject 8,000 people with a placebo, and I'll inject my vaccine into another 8,000. There's a reasonably probability that the half with the "real" vaccine will have less car accidents, thus showing progress in my vaccine! TLDR: Vaccine trials are useless without infecting people.

Re:New Vaccine prevents Card Accidents!

[Anonymous Coward]

Worst. Car. Analogy. Ever! You probably think a standard deviation is, "guys who dig chicks with hairy armpits."

Take 16,000 drivers at random. Send half of them through intensive accident avoidance training. Give the other half a fifteen minute lecture on traffic safety and a "Safe Driver" sticker. Let commuting take its course and tote up the body work needed, with only portion of the whole 16,000 subjects actually getting into a fender bender. Now count the number of people in both populations involved in those accidents, seeing if there's a significant statistical difference in numbers between those that got the training and those that didn't.

What you're proposing would mean is sending all 16,000 drivers into a surprise demolition derby.

Re:New Vaccine prevents Card Accidents!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

There's a reasonably probability that the half with the "real" vaccine will have less car accidents, thus showing progress in my vaccine! TLDR:

What statistical methodology leads you to think that the half with the "real" vaccine will have 30% fewer car accidents?

Re:New Vaccine prevents Card Accidents!

[John Hasler]

> There's a reasonably probability that the half with the "real" vaccine will > have less car accidents...

Statistical significance.

So the pool is partially open?

[Anonymous Coward]

CANNONBALL!

the deffinition of an eon

[TiggertheMad]

Fortunately, that gives the the researchers plenty of time...

Partially Successful

[muftak]

Only cures good AIDS, doesn't work on bad AIDS

Pools Closed..

[gandhi_2]

Everyone has AIDS!
AIDS AIDS AIDS!
AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS!
Everyone has AIDS!


And so this is the end of our story
And everyone is dead from AIDS
It took from me my best friend
My only true pal
My only bright star (he died of AIDS)


Well I'm gonna march on Washington
Lead the fight and charge the brigades
There's a hero inside of all of us
I'll make them see everyone has AIDS


My father (AIDS!)
My sister (AIDS!)
My uncle and my cousin and her best friend (AIDS AIDS AIDS!)
The gays and the straights
And the white and the spades

Everyone has AIDS!
My grandma and my dog 'ol blue (AIDS AIDS AIDS)
The pope has got it and so do you (AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS)
C'mon everybody we got quilting to do (AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS)
We gotta break down these baricades, everyone has
AIDS! x 20

flawed

[angelwolf71885]

the test was flawed it assumes all the ppl f the study have the exact same risk when it dose not.. the only true test is to inject ALL the subjects with HIV infected fluid and see who gets hiv when

I don't know how you can buy these results...

[HerculesMO]

They gave the vaccine to people who didn't have aids in two groups, and then looked at who got aids after 3 years.

It could just be that people on the placebo took more risks than the people who didn't which is why it is a statistical outlier.

This is the most ridiculously published study I've ever seen, but if they are looking for funding, I guess it's a good way to get it.

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll never understand what makes the general public think they are qualified to critique scientific studies.

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[danlip]

They gave the vaccine to people who didn't have aids in two groups, and then looked at who got aids after 3 years.

It could just be that people on the placebo took more risks than the people who didn't which is why it is a statistical outlier.

This is the most ridiculously published study I've ever seen, but if they are looking for funding, I guess it's a good way to get it.

The participants wouldn't know if they got the placebo or not, so it shouldn't affect their behavior. The group is large enough that random statistical variation is highly unlikely to show those results. So the study is not ridiculous at all, it was very well done. The vaccine is not effective enough to be practical, but it has some affect, which is a big improvement over what we had before - it's just more work is needed.

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[Harlan879]

It could just be that people on the placebo took more risks than the people who didn't which is why it is a statistical outlier.

Why would they take more risks? The whole point of a placebo is that you don't know if it's a placebo or not. So there's no reason to expect a change in behavior in one group versus the other. In fact, the behavior change should be driven in the other direction. If there was some reason to think that you got the vaccine (say, side effects not present with the placebo), then you would be likely to increase your risky behavior and increase your likelihood of infection! In this case, they got an effect in the other direction -- the treated group had less infections.

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[Entropius]

From your attitude I take it you're involved in science somehow, have a clue what's going on, and consider yourself qualified.

It's clear grandparent doesn't understand the concept of a blind study (where the test subjects don't know what group he's in). Considering that the whole point of science is the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, rather than being condescending to him you might try explaining how these trials are done so that's not a factor.

Thanks for making people think we're all elitists.

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[HerculesMO]

I'm not saying they purposely took more risk, I'm just saying it may have just so happened to be that way, that the group with the placebo took more risk than the one with the regular drug.

That's why the whole setup is bogus.

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[Harlan879]

That's how random-assignment experimental design is done. It's not bogus. It's very well understood both statistically and philosophically. I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's been the basis of the scientific method for a couple hundred years...

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you calculate the odds that this was the case? What number did you come up with? At what level would you stop considering the test to be bogus? What sample size does that correspond with? How does that number differ from other statistical studies, and as a corollary, how many studies out there in journals are, by your definition bogus?

I can only suspect, then, that you consider all public polling bogus because there's a 1 in 20 chance that the numbers they're presenting are incorrect?

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[HerculesMO]

I understand the principle behind the randomization, but if you aren't accounting for their propensity to engage in risky behavior that would get them the disease, how does a vaccine get tested in that instance?

I mean ultimately, all you proved is that group B is more likely to get HIV than group A. I have seen random studies done plenty of times, so to avoid bias, but this avoids bias and avoid accuracy too.

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[Harlan879]

That's why you randomize, to avoid having to measure and control for the propensity to engage in risky behavior. I'm really puzzled what you think you're trying to argue. This is the simplest design in the world. Two equal groups of randomly-assigned people. One group gets a treatment, one gets a placebo. Neither group knows which group they're in. Measure the outcome. How would you do it better?

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[HerculesMO]

In this case neither had the disease though. Obviously, they can't expose the individuals to the disease purposely.

My problem with the random assignment is that you have no way of measuring whether one group had more risky sex or not. So you aren't measuring whether the drug works at all, because if by chance, Group A just had less risky sex and Group B had more, the chances are obviously higher for Group B to get infected. Thus, the measurement of the drug preventing the disease is skewed.

I don't know how to do it 'better', the only way to do that is to get people to willingly have sex with those with HIV and see how it works out, but obviously that's immoral and unethical and just plain mean, so the only way to measure seems to be the way they conducted -- unfortunately without capturing their sexual behaviors and whether they had sex with HIV infected people, the ultimate result of this study seems pointless to me, at least.

Re:I don't know how you can buy these results...

[Hatta]

If you can randomly assign 16000 people to two groups, and have all the risk takers end up in group A instead of group B, you have really, really, really bad luck.

Imagine that you have 16000 ping pong balls, 8000 of them are white, 8000 of them are black. (let's say that black ones are risk takers) Randomly assign them to two groups. What are the chances that group A has a significantly higher proportion of black balls than group B? If statistics is correct, there's going to be damn near a 50/50 distribution of white and black balls in both groups. If both groups have an equal number of risk takers and risk avoiders, then you can't blame the result on the behavior of the group.

Yes, there's always the possibility that you will flip a coin 16000 times, and it will come up tails 12000 times instead of the predicted 8000. The chances of that are very, very small however. Does this make sense now?

Partially use condoms?

[fhuglegads]

Can I partially use condoms in conjunction with the vaccine and be safe? My dad never talked about this during the birds and bees talk.

Re:Partially use condoms?

[ColdWetDog]

Can I partially use condoms in conjunction with the vaccine and be safe? My dad never talked about this during the birds and bees talk.

Sure. Put the vial of vaccine in the condom. Leave the complex in your bathroom.

Go about your typical monastic, Slashdot lifestyle.

You'll be pretty safe*.

* yes, there is a low likelihood you will be exposed to the HIV virus from non sexual exposure. You can also get hit with a meteor. Accurate to one significant figure (if that). Pay your taxes. Do not taunt happy fun ball.

Unconvincing statistics

[Anonymous Coward]

At least the article has some numbers so we can to the (approximated) maths ourselves. The numbers of infected for medicine/placebo are 51 and 74, respectively. The error of the difference is then sqrt(54+71) = 11 (poissonian statistics). The difference itself is 74-51 = 23, so we can conclude that 23 +/- 11 persons were saved from infection. That means that we're just two standard deviations (23/11) away from the null result. This will happen by coincidence 5% of the time. So if they'd done the study 20 times, you'd expect this outcome once. Now this study has only been done once, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 20 different AIDS medications have been tested over time, and so it's quite likely to see this outcome once. Conclusion: This warrants further study, but they really haven't proven much yet. In fact, if they were physicists and not physicians they would have proven nothing. Especially since they, by their own admission, cannot explain the result.

Re:Unconvincing statistics

[Entropius]

Physicists (at least the batch I work with) consider a 2SD signal in the same way: "Hm, this is interesting, let's look at this some more."

If they were physicists they would have proven nothing, just like these guys proved nothing. "Prove" is a funny word. But they have demonstrated something promising.

Re:Unconvincing statistics

[KumquatOfSolace]

I'm too lazy to do the math so I ran a simulation instead.

With groups of size 8000, if the vaccine is ineffective, and if the probability of a subject becoming infected is (51+74)/2/8000=0.0078125, then the probability of getting >=23 FEWER infections in the vaccine group is around 2%.  I suspect this is low enough for a drug trial to be generally considered a success, but yes it could certainly happen by chance.  It's not a proof, it's a trial.

    MTRand rng(1);

    unsigned count = 0;

    double prob = 0.0078125;

    for(unsigned itr=0; itr<100000; itr++){
        int c1 = 0;
        int c2 = 0;

        for(unsigned i=0; i<8000; i++){
            if(rng.rand()<prob){
                c1++;
            }

            if(rng.rand()<prob){
                c2++;
            }
        }

        if(c1-c2>=23){
            count++;
        }
    }

    printf("count: %u = %.6f\n", count, (double)count/100000);

Vaccine was actually found many years ago!

[fifewiskey]

Didn't Magic Johnson originally find that money will actually cure your HIV? So, this really isn't new news is it?

Re:Vaccine was actually found many years ago!

[Theoboley]

As noted in an episode of south park.

amend my theology

[jollyreaper]

But I thought AIDS was sent by God as a scourge of teh gheys. So God must hate the 68.8% it doesn't work for, then.

Re:amend my theology

[sorak]

Have you ever considered that maybe God loves the unborn AIDS viruses more?

Re:amend my theology

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course he does, they are undead like his own son!

Re:amend my theology

[sorak]

Of course he does, they are undead like his own son!

You must be thinking of herpes. They go away for a few days, and then miraculously return.

what I want to know is. . .

[kimvette]

How the heck do they find volunteers for this kind of thing? Does it go like this:

"Hey kid, let us inject you with 'weak' HIV virus concoctions and then treat you to the hooker of your choice. Oh, and here's some heroin to shoot yourself up with. Have a blast!"

Seriously though; who the heck would willingly subject themselves to any strain of HIV? A vaccine is designed to give you a mild form of the disease that you're trying to prevent. A "mild" case of AIDS doesn't sound much better than a full-blown case - and what about that tiny percentage which already has a compromised immune system and develops the full-blown infection? This can and does happen with vaccines.

AIDS is relatively easy to prevent. Don't be a slut, don't do drugs, etc. and the chances of contracting it are miniscule. The only drawback to that (abstinence) is being a good samaritan is scary - if someone is in a bad car accident and you're trained in first aid, do you help or don't you? Your conscience says yes, but your self-preservation instincts kick in and you think to yourself "I wonder if this person has HIV or hepatitis." Oh and another one: what if your dentist or doctor or tattoo artist or hairdresser or whoever is infected? Vaccines are good for those situations I suppose, but is it worth the risk of a vaccine giving you the full-blown disease?

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[lattyware]

Actually, you can get HIV from any contact with blood to yours, you don't have to do drugs or be a slut to get it. As to a vaccine being a mild form of the disease, now-a-days it's now a dead form. Your body can still develop an immune responce due to dead viral cells, and this is what is done. Of course, IANAScientist/Doctor, so this is what what I have been told.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[geekoid]

Don't marry anyone who may ahve secretly been sleeping around, don't get a blood transfusion, odn't mkae a mistake.

Sheesh, What kind of idiot is against an HIV/AIDS vaccines?

"This can and does happen with vaccines."
What? cite please.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[bluefoxlucid]

AIDS is relatively easy to prevent. Don't be a slut, don't do drugs, etc. and the chances of contracting it are miniscule.

Hey my gf is a slut and we go through some decent lengths to keep her safe. Other people just randomly hook up "once in a while" and pick up diseases almost instantly. It's relatively hard to prevent if you don't want to mold yourself into some repeated image society wants for you... I happen to prefer my partner express what she really wants, and carry her on that path. I had one girl I asked out that was a fucking crazy nympho but "didn't want to be a slut" even though she was all steamy over like every hot guy she saw, I told her I'd help keep her level... and another that was shy about it but "really wanted to try everything" and was into group sex, and I support her in that.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[sdpuppy]

A vaccine is designed to give you a mild form of the disease that you're trying to prevent.

That is incorrect - although exposing a person to the mild form is a method.

The whole idea is to provoke an immune response (and "teach" the immune system to react ) to something similar to the disease.

This could be, as you say, a weakened form of the disease - or it could be another disease (google cowpox smallpox ), or it could be a protein or some other substance that the body identifies with the disease. For example, some of the recent cancer vaccines are products of chemical synthesis (pharmaceuticals) which is not derived from cancer.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

You're and IDIOT. You can't get Influenza from an Influenza vaccine, and you can't get HIV from an HIV vaccine. Stupid general public ignorant dumb mother fucker, get an education you American FUCK FACE.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[coolsnowmen]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bioterror/vacc_nf.html is the best description I found of how vaccines are made.

As a side note, all the new biology books that I've seen (2) don't consider viruses to be alive. So instead of alive/dead, they are active/inactive.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[nedlohs]

Because the subjects are smarter than you and know that there's more than one type of vaccine and they aren't all attenuated vaccines.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[guyminuslife]

If you RTFA, you might not have to post such silly nonsense.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

What kind of idiot is against an HIV/AIDS vaccines?

The exact same idiots that are against sex education/condom education in schools.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[Hatta]

AIDS is relatively easy to prevent. Don't be a slut, don't do drugs, etc. and the chances of contracting it are miniscule

Wouldn't the world be a much nicer place if you could sleep with whoever you want and take the drugs that you want and not have to worry about disease?

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't the world be a much nicer place if you could sleep with whoever you want

Absolutely not! God wants you to only have sex with your wife, whom you married in a church, which cost thousands of dollars!

Every time a man ejaculates outside of his wife (in the missionary position) it's murder of a child which might be otherwise conceived, or might be a born a bastard, and then cannot get into heaven (as per Deuteronomy 23:2)!

Using birth control is *MURDER*, and not using birth control with someone who is not your wife is *WORSE* than *MURDER* because it damns the child's soul!

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[mjwx]

AIDS is relatively easy to prevent. Don't be a slut, don't do drugs, etc. and the chances of contracting it are miniscule. The only drawback to that (abstinence) is being a good samaritan is scary

Wow, that's stupid and ignorant.

I mean really ignorant and really stupid, I want to get onto why you are wrong but I have to take a moment to digest the enormous stupidity and ignorance of this statement.

Because the high rates of teenage pregnancies in the US compared to other western nations has proven time and time again that abstinence works(TM). You are asking people to ignore all of their biological urges and imperatives. Now apply the abstinence philosophy to an Issan (Thailand's poorest region) girl who has little else to do but eat, sleep, work, talk or screw (and Thai ladies are good at four of those five activities for a reason). There's little TV or mobile phone access because they are fairly poor (The minimum wage in the Phuket province is 209 Baht (THB) per day and Phuket is one of the richest and most expensive provinces in Thailand). Add to this that there is no stigmata against sex in Buddhist cultures. Abstinence as protection against pregnancies and STD's is a complete and utter failure.

AIDS is however quite easy to prevent, use a condom. Don't give me guff about how it doesn't feel right or I cant get a hard on (there's a pill for that, most of us dont need it though), that's nothing compared to not getting an STD. Saying that Druggies and Whores are responsible for STD is just as stupid and ignorant as those saying HIV is god punishing the gays. It's just you projecting your dislikes without any evidence or subjective thought.

Re:what I want to know is. . .

[ResidntGeek]

Wow, that's stupid and ignorant. I mean really ignorant and really stupid, I want to get onto why you are wrong but I have to take a moment to digest the enormous stupidity and ignorance of this statement.

would have been better if it hadn't been followed soon by

Don't give me guff about how it doesn't feel right or I cant get a hard on (there's a pill for that, most of us dont need it though),

Stats 101

[TiggertheMad]

Their results could mean that the group recieving the test vaccine came into contact with the virus 31.2% less.

No, you don't need to control their exposure. You can study the infection rate for the general population, and provided that your study group isn't unusually different from the general population (say, by being all sexually active gay men), you can expect a similar infection rate over time.

yes, there are potentially statistical deviations that could occur, but the larger the sample group and the more test that occur, the less likely this is. Go take some stats classes if you are curious about the methodology, but if they did the trial correctly your suggested interpretation is very unlikely.

Re:Stats 101

[moosesocks]

However, in this study, all participants received some sort of education along with the vaccine, simply as a matter of ethics and due diligence. This considerably lowered the exposure of both the control and experimental groups (there's a pretty massive body of work on this matter -- HIV incidence in developing nations could be enormously reduced with proper education alone).

This doesn't affect the results of the experiment, given that there was a control group that received educational advice, but not the vaccine. Both groups were advised to limit their exposure. The presence of the control group also effectively cancels any selection bias that might have been present in the trial.

Extrapolating a trial performed on a limited set of participants to the general population is a dangerous game. The scientists running this trial were wise not to have done it.

I wonder...

[netscan]

if the infection rate would have been even lower had they just educated the participants about prevention... All of those infected were thrown to the wolves so to speak just to see what would happen.

Re:I wonder...

[ledow]

Er... they *all* underwent the same sex and infection-control education courses, according to the BBC article. Medical researchers don't throw people to the wolves just for the sake of science... at least, not any reputable ones whose research they expect to be followed up.

Re:I wonder...

[lattyware]

And if they had never run the test, the results would have been the same. Please, don't push blame onto others, we have enough of that into modern society. There is plenty of education forced down your throat at every turn about HIV/AIDS, if you don't know about it, it is your fault.

Re:I wonder...

[netscan]

Who reads the effing article.. I obviously didn't, the CNN version I caught this morning mentioned none of the previous attempts at educating the participants. I shall crwal back in my hole now

Re:I wonder...

[1729]

There is plenty of education forced down your throat at every turn about HIV/AIDS, if you don't know about it, it is your fault.

There's a lot of misinformation out there too. For example, consider all of the conspiracy theories about AIDS. In places where the populace is not well-educated, it's no surprise that these beliefs take hold, particularly in light of past abuses like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

Re:I wonder...

[Entropius]

"modern society" != Thailand (or most places in Africa, etc.)

If you don't know about it and you're an American, then yes -- it's your fault. But the rest of the world is not like this.

An African friend of mine told a story where a well-meaning group of aid workers went to a rural village in Africa and explained to them that using condoms during sex would protect against HIV. They didn't have model penises so they had people use their thumbs to practice putting condoms on. A year later, the village had ordered lots of condoms but HIV rates hadn't gone down. Trouble was, the people would put the condoms on their thumbs and then fuck.

Re:I wonder...

[Artifakt]

I'd like to thank you for using your posting nym and responding fairly to the criticism offered before you crawled back into your hole. In fact, I shall refrain from grammar nazi-ing your obviously inadvertent typo out of respect for your display of integrity. Have a modest but sincere "Bravo."

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern Society != Only America either.

Re:I wonder...

[RealErmine]

Medical researchers don't throw people to the wolves just for the sake of science... at least, not any reputable ones whose research they expect to be followed up.

Hi, everybody!

Re:I wonder...

[Entropius]

I'm not implying it is. Probably should have said "All the rest of the world is not like this" to make that explicit. I used America as an example because it's most likely that the GGP is American, considering the readership of ./

Warcraft is now considered foreplay

[Enderandrew]

I take it you haven't seen this ad.

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/lax/878989144.html

Re:Warcraft is now considered foreplay

[Anonymous Coward]

joke ad is a joke

I am hopeful.

[No-Cool-Nickname]

I have reviewed the other comments and agree that 30% is not much help and that it may encourage risky behavior from those who believe it to be a magic bullet.

Given all of that, I am still hopeful. We had a disease that until now we had made no significant inroads on controlling. Now we have something. We have a beta version or an alpha. Maybe some smart guy will come up with a beta 2 that covers 40%. Then 50%. Maybe in my kids lifetime this horrible disease will be gone... ...and I can start screwing total strangers with impunity again!

So Sad

[Das Auge]

I used to think I was somewhat intelligent...and then I read your post... :(

Once you've had AIDS

[MillionthMonkey]

The existing battery of drugs is enough to put HIV into remission. Your immune system will remain healthy and the virus particles will essentially disappear. But it's somewhere inside you; if you stop taking those drugs, it eventually comes back although you may have to wait.

HIV has long been known to hide somewhere in the body after drugs have eliminated the actual virus particles. They found where recently; it integrates its sequence into the DNA of T-cells, and the promoter at the start of the viral sequence is capped by a repressor protein. Once it comes off its DNA binding site, viral proteins start getting transcribed again.

They actually developed a drug that can kick it off there and make your AIDS come back again.

Re:Once you've had AIDS

[ascari]

Reminds me of that joke about the guy who asks the hooker if she got aids, and when she says "No", he says "Good, I don't want that shit again"

20/20: HIV super-spreader among 50s women

[peter303]

Last Friday's 20/20 was about a some middle-age guy who bedded middle-age women almost every day and infected at least a dozen of them (proven in court by DNA analysis). He must of have had a very effective virus or technique, because infection usually doesnt happen in just a few times. He got 45 years for knowing recklessness. But this was less than two years of his exploits. There is suggestion it was going on for over 12 years and there are many other victims.

The point is that some demographics think they are "safe" because they arent connected with risky types, i.e. gays, druggies, promiscuous youth. But sex is something people lie the most about, and you can never be sure.

P.S. The show & court trial did examine the issue of whether there could be "victims" if there was consensual relations. That wasnt fully resolved in my mind.

Re:20/20: HIV super-spreader among 50s women

[Anonymous Coward]

P.S. The show & court trial did examine the issue of whether there could be "victims" if there was consensual relations. That wasnt fully resolved in my mind.

I can't understand why not. It's a lot like with frauds: You know you are agreeing to something but you are withhold some of the additional information you would desperately need to make an informed decision.

BREAKING NEWS!

[DarthVain]

I have developed my own vaccine to HIV!

Simply subscribing to Slashdot makes you statistically 50% less susceptible to HIV!

I will take my 1 million dollar award in ten 100,000 dollar bills.

Seriously the study needs to be repeated and verified before anyone gets too excited.

It is not surprising that this was developed in Thailand due to the large sex trade there. Which makes me wonder about the demographic of the test subjects. Because of the large number of sex trade workers, any significant number in one group or the other will taint the results. If they were ALL sex trade workers that would be something different, however the article does not examine that detail. It could be that one group just happened to get 30% more sex trade workers than the other.

Also Slashdot I hate you and your stupid editor (not the person, the thing I am trying to type in).

What the article is really saying...

[DarthVain]

16,402 volunteers
2006
74 Infected Placebo
51 Infected Vaccine ...is that I can travel to Thailand and have sex with random people for 3 years, and I only have a 0.9% chance of getting HIV?

This isn't so much a medical study as it is a tourism promotion aimed at a target audience. Supply and Demand!

Re:What the article is really saying...

[guyminuslife]

You should still take precautions. Plenty of the tourists to Thailand do, by only sleeping with girls under 14. That means the girls have only had 5-6 years or so to contract the disease.

Re:What the article is really saying...

[ceoyoyo]

Perhaps you should work out the numbers a little more carefully.

They say that you can go to Thailand and have sex in a statistically similar way to this group of people, and "only" have 0.9% chance of getting HIV. I very much doubt the entire study population went out and had frequent sex with random strangers for three years.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not that your statement was accurate anyways but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to a rape victim.

opposite problem, too

[SuperBanana]

Finally, I think there's a problem with how the vaccine will be perceived. If the vaccine is only 30% effective, I think people will see that as being too risky to even get the shot.

I'd be willing to bet you'd also get a lot of people who would get the vaccine, and thus engage in more risky behavior, figuring they've got a 1-in-3 shot "if I happen to have sex with someone who has HIV, and...." You'll also get people saying to their partners "hey, don't worry, I got the vaccine"...whether they did or not.

It'll be even worse if the vaccine becomes 100% effective; say hello to skyrocketing rates of other STD's. At least a good chunk of the other ones are curable. HIV is the big nuclear scare for safe sex; without it, everyone's gonna get a bit less careful.

I'm going to guess that computer people...

[Benfea]

I'm going to guess that computer people are over-represented here, and it's been my experience that IT people and programmers are largely self-taught, which means that while they can be quite intelligent in a lot of different areas, they tend to have really glaring gaps in their understanding of things, and statistics is one of the really common ones.

I can't tell you how many arguments I've had with people who couldn't grasp really basic things about statistics only to have them argue "I know what I'm talking about because I'm a programmer" (argument from authority fallacy).

Result is NOT statistically significant

[fgrieu]

According to numerous online sources, raw numbers are:
51 out of 8187 found infected in the vaccinated group;
74 out of 8198 found infected in the control group.

The most basic course of statistics tells how to proceed from here: test if the null hypothesis (vaccine has no effect) remains plausible despite this evidence. Conditions are ideal for the chi-squared test.
We get Observed values 51, 74, 8147, 8123; Expected values 62.504, 62.496, 8135.5, 8134.5; then sum((O-E)^2/E) = 4.267, with two degrees of freedom.
Conclusion: the null hypohesis is rejected with only 88% confidence level.

This is not enough to confortably say that the vaccine has any benefit. Odds of the contrary are about 1/17.

This is much less reason to trust that the vaccine reduce infection rate by 31.1%, as reported in some press articles. Odds are 1/2 that it is less efficient than this.

    Francois Grieu

Dude nukem forever will be out before this vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

The efficiency is not based on the total test population anway. Just imagine if there was 1 people infected in the drug group and 2 in the control group. Would you say the vaccine has 50% efficiency ?

I might be wrong but 16000 is the population, 125 is the sample size. If that's correct, that mean a 8.7% error margin assuming the test process was absolutely perfect in perfectly balanced groups. While a 30% reduced infection rate looks outside of the range and have a decent chance to be a real observation, they should not brag about it too much yet, it's way bellow the confidence you must have before calling it a scientific proof.

Add to that the fact that :
  - the "no partial antibody response" and it's workaround theory looks quirky (even more than internet explorer 5 in quirks mode)
  - something could have gone wrong in the test process
  - if you do 10 studies more or less like this, it's very likely that 1 of them get lucky false positive with that kind of large error margin or false positive due to wrong test process

There's still a chance that duke nukem forever might be released before this HIV vaccine and if i was forced to bet my money one of them I would still pick that dude nukem forever as the race winer.

I will let the real math guy give their real formula and results, but as far as I'm concerned i have already set my computer clock to April 1 to be consistent with the article.

--
Stephane

What IF

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of creating a vaccine, Doctors could somehow manipulate the CCR-5 genetic mutation? The University of Pennsylvania is attempting to modify CCR-5 Genetic mutation. I don't know what the proper medical speak would sound like as I am NOT a medical professional. Rather,

I'm and individual trying to understand this from a researcher's perspective. It sounds promising, but who knows if or how it might work. Leave that to those more intelligent than us. The Wall Street
Journal had an article about a bone marrow transplant that functionally cured HIV/AIDS by seeking a donor that had a natural occurence of the CCR5 coreceptor mutation.
The WSJ called this a cure however, with only one known person to have this procedure. The first you instance/mention of this possibility I could find was here.

One has to wonder if this could be a real cure/treatment from HIV/AIDS, but we'll never know until a significant amount of testing/research has been done to prove this.

NOT A TROLL

[DriedClexler]

Sure, I'll tell that to a rape victim: all five or six that got HIV that way out of the millions who got it some other way.

And sure, my comment may not have been PC, but read the facts! Of the people who would be helped by a vaccine (i.e. not fetuses or infants), the second most common way to get it is from anal. Even unprotected penis-to-vagina sex still has a low risk, which casts doubt on the whole rape thing.

Seriously, refraining from engaging in a type of sex that's disgusting, unhealthy, and painful anyway is a pretty cheap way to protect yourself. If you're not willing to do that, um, *why* again, are we spending billions to protect you? Sheesh. I know of a billion people more deserving of that money than individuals (NOT NECESSARILY GAY) who just *have to have to have to* have one kind of sex without consequences. Ya know?

It's not a pleasant fact, but the truth is like that.

Good news, fags!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now there's a vaccine for the results of your terrible perversion! And the entire Castro district and the Apple campus shouted with glee!

NOT A TROLL? RRRrrrright....

[Anonymous Coward]

And sure, my comment may not have been PC

I never said anything about that. I said it was inaccurate (which was a bit of an understatement, I admit). You either have no clue about the issue or are a troll. I suspect the latter but in case you are just uninformed, I'll do my best...

but read the facts! Of the people who would be helped by a vaccine (i.e. not fetuses or infants), the second most common way to get it is from anal. Even unprotected penis-to-vagina sex still has a low risk, which casts doubt on the whole rape thing.

You are so grossly misinterpreting the statistics presented that I don't even know where to start!

First of all, those estimations (!) don't refer to the amount of HIV transmitted (!!). They refer to the risk of transmitting HIV per act. With sex, all of those refer to unprotected (!!!) sex.

They don't say "Anal is second most common way for transmitting HIV" they say "Receptive, unprotected anal sex has the second highest risk of infection per act".

So if we assume that 95% of sex is oral or vaginal and 5% is anal, amount of HIV transmissions from those other sources exceed amount of transmissions from anal by far.

And remember that this is all about unprotected sex. Anal usually is either between gay men or a man and a woman who have been together for a while already. In the first group HIV awareness is certainly higher than anywhere else and in the second group... If the couple has had unprotected sex for a while, the virus probably has already been transmitted.

In addition, interest to use a rubber is much higher with anal sex than with oral sex for example (for obvious reasons), regardless of your demographic.

So no, anal sex certainly isn't the second most common way of transmitting HIV. The statistics don't even imply that. If you read them like that, 90% of all HIV infections would be from blood transfers? Did that not seem odd to you?

Seriously, refraining from engaging in a type of sex that's disgusting,

Are you even TRYING not to sound like a religious nutjob? What you find disgusting and what other people find disgusting don't (and shouldn't) always match 100%. For certain (rather large) demographics anal sex is the only way to have sex. (And if you say "Oral is just as fine! It has all the feeling, atmosphere, etc. that normal sex has!" you are being ridiculous)

unhealthy,

Uh. List of enjoyable things that are unhealthy is pretty long. Unhealthy foods, sitting in front of a computer...

and painful anyway

I take it you have never had anal sex with a partner who knows what he is doing? No? Don't try to use that argument then.

is a pretty cheap way to protect yourself. If you're not willing to do that, um, *why* again, are we spending billions to protect you? Sheesh.

This just in: Isolating yourself away from civilization is pretty cheap way that completely protects you from most of the diseases! Um... *Why* again are we spending billions to protect people? I try to be as polite as I can but it is very difficult here...

I know of a billion people more deserving of that money than individuals (NOT NECESSARILY GAY) who just *have to have to have to* have one kind of sex without consequences. Ya know?

It's not a pleasant fact, but the truth is like that.

There was not a single trace of truth in your post.

If the point was "It is possible to avoid HIV by responsible behavior", yeah, it is to some extent. You can use a condom in short affairs. That would solve a lot of problems in the western countries. But no behavior protects you if your long time partner is not faithful to you. And what if you live in an African country where HIV is very common?