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SA HIV/AIDS vaccine trials all set to go
Patrick Leeman. The Mercury. 18 March 2003. Republished courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd.
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South African researchers are all set to go ahead with the first batch of HIV/AIDS vaccine testing and will this week place advertisements in local newspapers calling for volunteers to be vaccinated.
This was said in Durban on Monday by Andrew Robinson, trial site director for the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative (SAAVI), and based at the Medical Research Council in the city.
He was addressing a workshop on the vaccine initiative at the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Robinson said the most optimistic timeframe for a possible breakthrough in finding a suitable vaccine was a decade from now, that is, in the year 2013.
He said that the development of a suitable vaccine offered the best possible hope for curbing the spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.
Robinson said those who received the vaccine would become "vaccine-positive" but they would not become HIV-infected.
He said the vaccine to treat Clade A type of HIV and AIDS, a type found in Kenya and Tanzania and already used on volunteers in Nairobi and Oxford in the United Kingdom, had yet to be approved by the ethics committee of the South African department of health.
This type of vaccine was already "in the bottle", the medical researcher said. The vaccine for Clade C HIV/AIDS, the type that was found in South Africa, had yet to be passed by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States.
Robinson said that, when a suitable vaccine for HIV/AIDS was found, his own view was that it should be included in a range of treatment for infants or pre-primary children when they were immunised for childhood diseases such as mumps or measles.
He said the initiative to find a vaccine in South Africa was being driven at sites in Durban and at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Robinson said the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative hoped to start with the first phase of the vaccine programme by the end of June.
Eligible entrants for the trials would be required to be between the ages of 18 and 60, to be HIV-negative and free of conditions such as Hepatitis B and anaemia. |
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