AIDS expert reports progress towards HIV vaccine

It has been a while since I've written on this subject. Obviously I want a cure for AIDS as soon as possible and furthermore, as a matter of global public health and progressive development, I would call for a vaccine to be distributed for free to all Third World countries including China. However, as much as I want AIDS to be thrown in to the dustbin of cured diseases, one has to consider exactly what the lesson of AIDS has taught us and where as a global society we are going to go from here. You see, this is where my conservatism really comes out.

I have no definite answers here and I'm not going to go in to some Jerry Falwell-type rant about sexual permiscuity caused AIDS because nobody really knows how AIDS came to be. Man's on-going arch enemy has always been transmittable viruses and they've entered our lives through all sorts of carriers such as rats and barn yard animals. However, our behavior in light of serious pandemics is the issue I want to examine. Sexual premiscuity and rampant drug use (sometimes in conjunction with one another) turned AIDS from one of many obscure viruses into a world-wide plague. In many cases it has forced societies all over the world, including the US to change its collective behavior and become somewhat more responsible. Now in many cases there have been no changes and even worse, not even an acknowledgment that there's even a probem (China and Russia I'm looking squarely at you).

That being said, suppose AIDS is cured and completely eliminated throughout the world in 10 years - then what? Do we as a society then go back to being a world of free-loving, dope-fiending whores or do we continue to encourage responsible behavior in that people stop depending on drugs to mask their pain and run from their problems, and stop attempting to break Wilt Chamberlain's record for sexual encounters? If we do not continue to promote responsible behavior (a drug-free life and limited sexual partners) will we be faced with yet another virus, this time even deadlier than AIDS?

Sex and drugs aside, we're having enough problems with just diseases stemming from our food supply such as Bird Flu and Mad Cow Disease. All I'm asking for here is for people to consider the evidence and gravity of terminal pandemics and then adapt their behavior to the circumstances of their environment. At the risk of fear mongering, let me add that continual insistence on irresponsible behavior in the face of irrefutable evidence that certain behaviors bring society ruin (hunting a species to extinction, pollution, rampant sexual promiscuity, drug use etc.) will ultimately lead to collapse of said society. Surely students of history will note that societal collapse is not new, not ancient and not beyond the realm of possibility. Events in Africa, largely stemming from the AIDS crisis reminds of this on a daily basis.

Here's the story:

A scientist who helped to discover the HIV virus said he has made progress towards producing an AIDS vaccine and hopes to launch a clinical trial in about a year.

Dr. Robert Gallo, the director of the University of Maryland's Institute for Human Virology, said results from animal studies were encouraging.

"I think we've made some advances in making antibodies that will react with the variety of strains of HIV," he told Reuters, referring to the virus that causes AIDS.

Scientists believe a vaccine is the best hope for ending the global AIDS pandemic that has killed about 3.1 million people this year. But defeating the virus has proved more difficult than researchers had expected.

Gallo, in Israel to accept an award from Bar-Ilan University in advance of World AIDS day on Thursday, said it was still too early to say when a vaccine could be produced for humans.

Researchers believe an effective AIDS vaccine is still many years away.

"We have had some interesting results in the monkeys that show we can make an immune response,", Gallo said, noting potential progress on overcoming the problem of mutation of the virus.

But the antibodies produced in his experiments lasted only up to four months, which is far less than needed for an effective vaccine.

"We are making progress with a preventive vaccine, but we are not there yet," added Gallo, who discovered the AIDS virus with France's Luc Montagnier.

Earlier this week Europe's biggest drug maker GlaxoSmithKline Plc announced a plan to develop an experimental AIDS vaccine along with France's Institut Pasteur.

They intend to make the vaccine by fusing genes from HIV on to an existing vaccine for measles.

More than 30 AIDS vaccine trials in humans are ongoing but no one can predict if any will be effective against the virus that has infected nearly 5 million people in 2005.

Antiretroviral drugs have prolonged lives of people with HIV/AIDS but public health experts say preventing the spread of virus, by using condoms, abstinence and needle exchange programmes, is also essential for halting the epidemic.

The number of people living with HIV/AIDS hit a record high of 40.3 million this year, according to the latest figures from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organisation.