( 4UMF NEWS ) Vaccine To Prevent AIDS Found:
Scientists now believe a licensed vaccine is within reach to prevent AIDS.
It has taken years to dispel a string of failed attempts – punctuated by a 2007 trial in which a Merck vaccine appeared to make people more vulnerable to infection, not less – that have cast a shadow over AIDS vaccine research.
But a 2009 clinical trial in Thailand was the first to show it was possible to prevent HIV infection in humans. Since then, discoveries have pointed to even more powerful vaccines using HIV-fighting antibodies.
Still, as many as 34million people are infected with HIV worldwide. And with 2.7 million new infections in 2010 alone, experts say a vaccine is still the best hope for eradicating AIDS.
The research has come a long way from an ill-fated press conference in 1984 when U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler boldly predicted an effective AIDS vaccine would be available within just two years.
‘We know the face of the enemy,’ said Dr. Barton Haynes, of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and recent director of the Center for HIV AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI).
The research consortium was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), founded in 2005 by the National Institutes of Health to identify and overcome roadblocks in the design of vaccines for the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. NIAID’s funding of CHAVI ended in June.
Unlike many viruses behind infectious disease, HIV is a moving target, constantly spitting out slightly different versions of itself, with different strains affecting different populations around the world.
