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Aids Vaccine to Begin Testing in Africa
In February, 1999, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced commencement of AIDS vaccine testing in Uganda.
Start Date: 2/10/99
According to an Associated Press story dated February 9, 1999, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced the commencement of AIDS vaccine testing in Uganda. The vaccine to be tested there is not the only vaccine developed so far, but NIH says this will be an important first effort to target a vaccine to areas of Africa that are hardest hit by the disease.
In Uganda, more than half a million people have reportedly died of AIDS, leaving up to a million children orphaned. In several nations of central and southern Africa, the HIV infection rate is above 20 percent of the total adult population, giving rise to the prospect that tens of millions of Africans could die of AIDS during the next decade.
The Uganda study tests a vaccine made by Pasteur Merieux Connaught that uses a canarypox virus to carry three HIV genes, according to the Associated Press. The canarypox cannot cause human disease, and the HIV genes by themselves aren't infectious, the NIH said. The vaccine, known as ALVAC, already has undergone safety testing in about 800 people in the United States and France with no serious side effects reported.
Complicating the development of vaccines is the fact that several HIV variants have been found to result in AIDS, and new variants could continue to appear over time. The ALVAC vaccine carries HIV genes from a variant found mostly in the United States and Europe. NIH hopes to discover whether those genes can trigger a human immune response to HIV variants found mainly in Africa.
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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