Posted by NewsEditor at 10:26 AM (PT)
In: health issues
Thursday
September
24,
2009
Source:
New York Times,
Reuters,
Xinhua,
Bloomberg 
A trial of an experimental HIV vaccine has shown that it might be “modestly protective”, researchers said Thursday.
The vaccine lowered the risk of HIV infection by about 31 percent among 16,000 heterosexual Thai volunteers who had no special risk of AIDS infection, the US and Thai government researchers said.
The results from the largest-ever vaccine trial represents a revival in a campaign for a vaccine that appeared to stall two years ago when use of Merck’s experimental Ad5 vaccine boosted some people’s chances of infection in a study, Bloomberg reports.
“Although the results were modest, with an efficacy of 31.2 percent, this is a very important scientific advance, and gives us hope that a globally effective HIV vaccine may be possible in the future,” said Jerome Kim, a deputy director of science at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, which co-sponsored the trial. “It has already caused us to change some of our ideas,” Kim told reporters.
This is the first of several trials that has shown any effectiveness in preventing HIV infection, but scientists warned that the vaccine protected too few people to be declared an unqualified success.
“I don’t want to use a word like ‘breakthrough,’ but I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is a very important result,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said, according to New York Times. NIAID is one of the trial’s backers.
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