First Phase of AIDS Vaccine Trials Successful 554
rbarreira writes "Xinhua online is reporting on the success of the first trial phase of an AIDS vaccine, which was started on March 2005. From the article: '"Forty-nine healthy people who received the injection showed no severe adverse reactions after 180 days, proving the vaccine was safe," said Zhang Wei, head of the pharmaceutical registration department of the SFDA. "The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity," he told the press conference.' After the results are further analyzed, 800 more voluntaries may be needed for the second and third phases of the vaccine's trial."
HIV (Score:5, Insightful)
All it takes is one night in the wrong club at the wrong time and no matter what kind of protection you have -- it could be too late.
Doesn't it take a little longer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:49? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyhow -- this is very good news.
Re:Duck and Cover (Score:2, Insightful)
Blood samples (Score:1, Insightful)
Lack of information (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual press release is more cautious than the excerpt that is quoted here; describing the result of the trials as saying that the vaccine is "safe and possibly effective." Apparently there were no ill effects, and if I interpret the text correctly, they detected antibodies against whatever these people were injected with. Which does not prove at all that the vaccine could be effective, because the envelope proteins of HIV are so variable that buidling up immunity is enormously difficult. However, it is probably as much as one could reasonably hope for in this first phase of trials.
That said, there is nothing in this press release to suggest that this vaccine trial will have a better outcome than the series of failed trials that have already preceded it. Mainly because there is very little information in this press release at all. Obviously, it was written by someone who did not have a clue about the science behind the trials; you can't tell from this what the vaccine consists of and how it is supposed to work. More worryingly, the "director of the National Institute for the Control of Pharmaceutical and Biological Products" is quoted as saying that "The HIV-1 specific cells injected into the recipients were the DNA fragments of the virus which don't cause infection." Which is nonsensical enough to suggest that the aforementioned director, who held the press conference, doesn't have a clue either. Probably he is more remarkable for his political skills than his medical ability.
But maybe these Chinese researchers are on the right track -- who knows? A vaccine against HIV is very much needed, and the hope that we will be able to create one seems to shrink with every new failure.
Re:49? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:obvious question (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be nice if someone did a control first to see if people infected with HIV actually die.
To this date, noone has managed to live forever (i.e. not die). Please post evidence that people infected with HIV life forever.
Re:Umm ... (Score:5, Insightful)
What about blood transfusions, broken condoms, infected partners that picked it up via adultery, rape victims and dumb kids who don't know any better (since we don't teach them safe sex, and they're too hormoned-up not to fuck)? That doesn't even get into the mess over in Africa. Are you seriously prepared to condemn every single infected person simply due to the fact that many of the dying got that way from carelessness?
An ounch of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That doesn't mean however that you can always prevent bad things from happening, or that we shouldn't care enough to try and find a cure.
And by the way, your arguement can be twisted for just about anything. Why should we try to develop a cure for cancer? Those people should have known to get themselves checked up (many cancers can be detected early, via screening, thereby removing the need for any miracle cure), and should have known to avoid carcinogens (do you check everything you eat?). Yet to take that stance both condemns people for honest mistakes, and condemns the blamelessly unlucky along with the careless by denying them a cure as well.
HIV test (Score:5, Insightful)
For the non-biologists: vaccines are often based on exposing the body to a protein from the virus (but not the entire virus). In doing so, the body produces antibodies that recognize the protein. The next time the body sees the protein (i.e. when exposed to the actual virus), the body will be able to quickly destroy the virus particles before the person becomes infected.
However, a lot of tests for viral infection is based on the presence of the antibodies in blood. So, if the person has been immunized using the vaccine, the person will have those antibodies in blood, and it becomes difficult to tell whether the antibodies came as a result of vaccination or infection.
Re:obvious question (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Duck and Cover (Score:1, Insightful)
Plus any theory that has any political influence attached attracts many times as many crackpots as a non-political subject - see Soviet-era Russian biology, creationism, and social darwinism as examples of what happens when politics and science collide. Without exception in history the crackpot theories have been wrong.
(Posting Anon from a different computer to avoid undoing my moderations)
Re:Umm ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, he is. He is a Christian.
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is also why some drugs get through the testing hurdles and still manage to kill/harm thousands of people. Even when the statistical formulae work out, there is still the chance that the result was due, in part, to randomness in the population. Consider that 100 is 99.99% of 1,000,000...
lovely (Score:2, Insightful)
Warts can keep coming back, and they give you cancer.
Plenty of "curable" things leave you (or your baby) with permanent damage.
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between a vaccine and a cure. If you could cure someone of AIDS and give their immediate descendants of some minor birth defects, that might be worthwhile. But a vaccination is something that would be given to everyone in order to prevent them from getting HIV in the first place. This being the case, birth defects are definitely not an acceptable consequence.
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:3, Insightful)
You can be SURE that this had been done previously. This is just phase 1 of the HUMAN trial. There were probably hundreds of smaller tests done previously, on various lab animals, human blood samples, etc. They only start human trials when they know, to a certain extent, that there is a very low risk of infection or death due to the vaccine.
This is VERY promising. Just think about it... HIV is an INCURABLE disease, which kills %100 of it's victims. As of now, 49 people out of 49, were infected with HIV and didn't catch it. It may just be preliminary results, but this is very very good. There are millions dieing on a contant south-east of ours, of whome this vaccine will save. I'm suprised that it's taken a year and a half for the reports of phase 1 to move along. I hope that Phases 2 and 3 are MUCH MUCH shorter. I would expect them to have a moral obligation to get this thing through the system as quickly as possible. Hell, even if it outright KILLED 10% of patients, remember that about 50% of people in Africa have AIDS and are going to die... those are MUCH better odds.
Re:Umm ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't show.
Why is it important to develop a way to allow people who have little regard for their own health to remain healthy?
Because compassion is one of the things that makes us human?
(Leaving aside cold-blooded economic arguments about how you'd much rather have healthy productive workers contributing to your economy than sick people who are draining it. AIDS doesn't make business sense.)
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell that to the gay community.
Safety, not Efficacy (Score:3, Insightful)
All that has been demonstrated is that the vaccine doesn't have an immediate lethality in a small group of (presumably) ethnically similary people. They placed HIV virsues in blood samples obtained from these people, and the blood mounted an immune response. I'd like to point out that even people dieing of AIDS demonstrate an immune response to the HIV virus -- this is the very nature of the ELISA test used to diagnose the disease! Further, a demonstrated "immunity" in a small sample of blood is nothing; the body demonstrated immunity to the disease, often for the better part of a decade, before dying of it during the normal course of HIV/AIDS.
So, while any development towards a vaccine for the HIV virus is unquestionably a good things, lets not read too far into this.
Re:obvious question (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not his logic. His logic is that reasonable tests of the HIV/AIDS theory have shown it to be most probably true, and there is a high correlation between seropositivity for HIV and the development of and eventual death due to AIDS related illnesses. If your argument is that we shouldn't trust *any* fact that we are handed, you are correct: no fact is 100% true. But that makes life unviable, and there are reasonable, recognized criteria for distinguishing between truthful claims and deceptive ones. One of those criteria is the amount of scientific evidence furnished to prove a claim. There is a ton of such evidence for the HIV/AIDS correlation, just like there is a ton of evidence for evolution and global warming.
Your only other response is that smart people aren't to be trusted.
Please take a look at his logic again. You are deliberately changing the sense of his statement. All he said was that smart people shouldn't be trusted just because they have a history of being smart. That is, intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being correct about intellectual or scientific questions.
Funny, all the people I listed say they've been looking for that link in the science journals and have never seen it.
The link is implied by the amount of data supporting it and widely recognized. There is no scientific paper that is *simply* about the link between HIV and AIDS, but the statistical supporting the accepted link is overwhelming. My other post [slashdot.org] details why it is these scientists' burden of proof to challenge what is seen as a reasonable conclusion about the relationship between HIV and AIDS.
Re:Umm ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ummm... the same reason we talk people down off bridges and high buildings? Compassion, maybe? Not to mention the fact that these people end up with others who are more responsable, and simply don't know their partners are infected. Really though, even though you're being modded Troll, you've got a point; but just leaving people to twist in the wind isn't moral from my point of view. We really need to eliminate the attitude of fatalism that some people have, especially young people. You see a lot of articles where people have the attitude of "it's only a matter of time before I get it". Before we can use any of the methods you describe to stop HIV, we need to figure out how to stop fatalism. We also need to stamp out arrogance. You hear a lot of people who think that HIV is a manageable illness like diabetes or herpes. It isn't. Like all successful vices, it buries those who would testify otherwise.
Re:Duck and Cover (Score:3, Insightful)
Homophobes - The evil gays are spreading disease!
Alternative therapy peddlers - I can cure AIDS with homeopathic medicine!
Politicians - AIDS was made by white men to kill black people!
Jackasses - Sure I'm HIV+ baby, but it doesn't cause AIDS!
Oh, forget it. This is too easy.
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hats off to those brave test subjects (Score:5, Insightful)
For the equivalent of $250.
Damn.
Guinea pigs could not be infected (Score:3, Insightful)
However, upon reading the article, it states:
and that makes a lot more sense now.
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the cells, they probably injected infected cells into recipients, which is exactly what the article says. It didn't say HIV-1 cells it said HIV-1 specific cells.
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Duck and Cover (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's inject you directly with some blood from an HIV+ person.
I'm sure we can find someone of your blood-type, with no other known pathogens - just HIV. Heck, if you're scared of contracting something else that we can't test for, I'm sure we could get some purified samples of HIV to inject you with.
After all - if it's lifestyle choices and not the virus, you'd have nothing to fear, right?
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does it? Seriously. That's a pretty big claim. You could make the same claim of diabetes. No cure. Without treatment you will die from it. But nobody thinks of it as a fatal condition. AIDS may well become something similar. Look at Magic Johnson, been diagnosed with HIV for 15 years. As far as anyone knows he is quite healthy. Given the way things look for him, at 47 years old he is more likely to die of old age than HIV/AIDS complications.
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:3, Insightful)
AC from parent would it bother you to take that permanent contraceptive?
If it would. Why?
Re:Proof of Immunity? (Score:3, Insightful)
You won't find any Communists in China under 75 these days. Mao died 30 years ago and Communism shortly after.
Re:Umm ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can reassure you, you aren't a dink. You're an ignorant asshole.
Ever heard of the hundreds of ways you can get infected without sex? Blood transfusions were a common vector in the early days, before everyone got paranoid about them, for example. You can still get the virus through blood, for example during an accident (with you as the victim, or you as the helper who doesn't wear protective clothes). Lots of kids are infected, and unless you believe they had sex at 3 or so, I'll go with the more reasonable option that their parents were infected.
There are other, less common ways as well.
So no, abstinence isn't a solution. It's just some meme that some people want to spread and they use every opportunity to sell it. If you ask the right people, abstinence probably cures acne and cancer as well, and leads to better eyesight and higher salaries.
Re:49 people + 180 days = proof?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Many people have a strange outlook on risk and statistics, especially young people. Buying lottery tickets, driving drunk, reckless driving, unsafe sex, et. al are symptoms of this. People aren't going to think of theirselves as at risk. I'd bet that most HIV+ people didn't plan on getting infected. I have a friend who got infected from her husband. She was a virgin when they got married. She thought there was no risk because she trusted him and they even got tested before the wedding. The African countries with 30% infection rates are full of similar stories.
AIDS is such a deadly disease and the medicines are so expensive to manage it. Smallpox, polio, etc. were all nearly eradicated by mandatory vaccination. Why not eradicate HIV too? People have always done stupid things, and they always will. If you're counting on human morality to control disease you're going to be disappointed.
If we get a working vaccine, let's spend 10+ years focusing on high-risk groups watching carefully for side effects. If it's effective and safe we have the chance to wipe it out entirely within a generation.