Word: hiv
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...action. Pfizer has also started experimenting with safer packaging. For example, all its Viagra blockbuster packs in the U.S. now have a radio-frequency-identification tag. Merck, meanwhile, is funding the distribution of minilabs to developing countries to improve detection of fake ingredients in drugs used to combat malaria, HIV and tuberculosis...
...Jonathan Weber, a professor of communicable diseases and an HIV expert at Imperial College in London, says the consistency of the viral load across the placebo and vaccine groups was not a surprise. "It's a fair assumption that this vaccine works through antibody production," he says. "We've known for years that antibodies don't seem to affect the course of an HIV infection. Antibodies can be preventive, but they can't modify the disease...
Colonel Jerome Kim, who helped lead the study for the U.S. Military HIV Research Program, says other unknowns remain about the vaccine, such as the duration of its effect, the potential need for additional boosters, its efficacy in higher-risk populations like intravenous drug users and, most crucially, whether it might work on other subtypes of the virus. "The vaccine was tested in Thailand against types of HIV that circulate in Thailand," Kim says, pointing out that a different strain of the virus causes high infection rates in Africa...
...significant period of time" before the trial results lead to a vaccine that can be submitted for approval for use in the general public, if such a breakthrough occurs at all. Most licensed vaccines have an efficacy rate of at least 70%, although it's possible that an HIV vaccine with lower efficacy may gain approval, Kim says. "The efficacy threshold may be a consideration that is specific to individual countries, the nature of their HIV-AIDS epidemics and the performance characteristics of the vaccine," Kim says...
...Fakoya, a London-based clinician and senior adviser to the British nonprofit AIDS Alliance, tells TIME that a 30% efficacy rate is still very low. By comparison, studies in Africa suggest that male circumcision can cut the risk of HIV infection in men by up to 60%. Still, in a field that has been beset by a series of high-profile failures in the past 20 years - in 2007, for example, two international trials of a promising Merck vaccine in about 4,000 people were stopped early, and later analysis suggested that the vaccine may have increased people's risk...