Although you probably haven't heard much about it, if anything at all, we may be on the way to the development, finally, of a vaccine that might, depending on the results of the clinical trials now being conducted in South Africa, lead to the drastic reduction and hopefully the eventually elimination of HIV/AIDS. It's literally a matter of life and death for South Africa, the most infected country in all the developing world.
It doesn't take much more than a cursory glance at the article linked to discern the reason for this-politics, of course, which feeds on superstition and, more importantly, ignorance. For example, from the article-
South Africa launched clinical trials of the first Aids vaccine created by a developing country today, as its own scientists overcame deep skepticism from political leaders who had shocked the world with their unscientific pronouncements about the disease.
In the 1990s, South Africa's then-President Thabo Mbeki denied the link between HIV and Aids, and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, mistrusted conventional anti-Aids drugs and made the country a laughing stock trying to promote beets and lemon as Aids remedies.
I remember hearing once how AIDS and gay activists were responsible for the lack of research in the US for the creation of an HIV vaccine. They wanted the bulk of funding to go into finding cures, not something that would merely prevent the further spread of the disease. While this might be true to a point, it is worth pointing out that there might be yet another reason for the lack of vaccine research and development. That being, in order to conduct such a clinical trial, any person used in any experiment must risk actually becoming infected with the HIV virus in the event the tests are unsuccessful or have mixed results.
Yet, so dire are the circumstances now in South Africa, there seems to be no choice, nor lack of willing subjects where hundreds of people are infected daily, and an almost equal number succumb from the ravages of the disease-or more accurately, any of a number of those diseases the victim's immune system can no longer ward off.
At a ceremony in Cape Town's Crossroads shantytown, one of the first of 36 healthy volunteers was injected today before officials and journalists.
I suppose somebody somewhere decided they had better proceed with the trials while there were still a sufficient number of uninfected individuals upon whom to test the vaccine. Clinical trials are also currently being conducted in Boston.
American health officials manufactured the vaccine at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and have given further technical help and assistance to the South African researchers. Here's hoping the first fruits of these much needed clinical trials bear worthwhile fruit.
