Word: viruses
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...vaccine was administered in two stages. First the ALVAC vaccine, which uses a Frankenstein virus of canarypox and HIV, was used as a primer dose, then AIDSVAX was administered as a "booster" to improve the body's immune response to the first shot. Half of the trial's participants received the combination vaccine, while the other half received a placebo. In the final analysis, 74 of the 8,198 placebo recipients became infected with HIV, compared with 51 of 8,197 participants who received the vaccine regimen...
...trial, led in Thailand by the U.S. Army and the Thailand Ministry of Public Health, said they were baffled as to why the two seemingly ineffective vaccines appeared to work together. Another mystery was that the people who became infected with HIV developed roughly the same amount of virus in their blood whether they got the vaccine or the placebo. Typically a protective vaccine would lower a patient's so-called viral load, a criterion that physicians use as the main indicator of HIV infection. The outcome of the trial of RV144 suggests that scientists do not fully understand what...
...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...
Across the country, the pattern is much the same. This year's novel flu virus is hitting much sooner than normal, long before cold weather forces people inside, where viruses like to fester, and weeks before the official start of flu season on Oct. 4. The virus has been gobbling geographic terrain in recent weeks, with 26 states reporting widespread flu illness on Sept. 19, up from 21 states a week earlier and just four states at the beginning of August. (Read "What You Need to Know About the H1N1 Vaccine...
...Health agencies have bombarded the public with guidance on how to prepare for the virus. But people who study risk have advice of a different sort. They recommend seeking out information and not relying on emotion alone. Often, the best information can be found by checking with multiple sources - the kind that don't always agree. Come up with a plan for how you might stay home with your children for a week, if need be. Give your brain something to do. Be careful about relying too much on TV news, a highly emotional medium. The brain can stagnate...