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.

No hurry

[4D6963]

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

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.

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.