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

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

[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

[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.

No hurry

[4D6963]

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

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

[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.

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: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: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".

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.

the deffinition of an eon

[TiggertheMad]

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

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: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.

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.