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...million, six-year trial, which involved more than 16,000 people in Thailand - the largest AIDS-vaccine trial ever conducted - found that an experimental vaccine was 31% effective in preventing HIV infection. The volunteer group in the study was representative of the general Thai adult population, including low-risk, heterosexual adults. Calling the results of the trial a "significant scientific advance," officials at the World Health Organization said the results reinvigorated the stalled quest for a vaccine against AIDS, which is estimated to kill some 2 million people globally each year. (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs...
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...
...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...
Between the nerves, the unfamiliarity and the urge to impress, few people do themselves justice on the first day of a new job. When it comes to doctors starting out in emergency medicine, though, are patients' lives being put at risk? According to research from Imperial College London, the death rate among patients admitted to English hospitals on the first Wednesday in August - the day, traditionally, that newly graduated doctors take up their posts - was, on average, 6% higher than for those admitted the last Wednesday in July. An influx of new medical staff, in other words, just might...
...Should patients be nervous? Scientists have for years been examining the patient risk associated with a changeover of medical staff. Smaller studies conducted over the past two decades in Britain and the U.S. - where researchers label it the "July phenomenon," after the month in which medical students usually begin training - have often proved inconclusive. (See pictures from an X-ray studio...