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A New AIDS Plan for Americans, and New Hopes for a Vaccine

September 14th, 2010 at 07:23am Under Health report

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

Researchers, policy makers and activists are busy preparing for the International AIDS Conference. The next conference begins Sunday in Vienna, Austria.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced its National HIV/AIDS Strategy. The plan aims to reduce new HIV infections by twenty-five percent within five years. It also aims to make sure infected patients get treatment more quickly.

HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. The government says sixty-five percent of Americans who discover they are infected get treatment within three months. The new plan calls for increasing that to eighty-five percent.

Thirty million dollars from the health care reform law is to go to support prevention activities, including expanded HIV testing.

Over one million Americans are living with the virus, out of an estimated thirty-three million people worldwide.

Last week, government scientists in the United States announced the discovery of two antibodies that raise hopes for an AIDS vaccine. They say these antibodies can stop more than ninety percent of all known strains of HIV. Antibodies are proteins that the body makes to help protect itself against infection.

Researchers made the discovery at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The director of its Vaccine Research Center, Gary Nabel, says each antibody blocks the virus from attaching to white blood cells.

GARY NABEL: “It reacts with that region, it inactivates the virus and the virus never has a chance to enter the cells that it would otherwise infect.”

The antibodies were discovered in a man, known as Donor 45, whose body produced them naturally.

Patients with HIV must take medicine all their lives to prevent AIDS. Combinations of drugs are able to suppress the deadly virus in the body — if not a cure, then the next best thing.

In another development, the United Nations reported Tuesday that the number of young people becoming infected with HIV in Africa is falling.

The U.N. AIDS agency gives credit to better use of preventive measures. It says young people in Africa are waiting longer to have sex. They are also having fewer sexual partners. And they are increasingly using condoms. As a result, the agency says HIV rates are falling in sixteen of the twenty-five hardest-hit countries in Africa.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Mario Ritter.  I’m Steve Ember.

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Includes reporting by Jessica Berman and Lisa Schlein

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Findings Raise Hopes for Progress on AIDS Vaccine

January 29th, 2010 at 08:33am Under Health report

This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

AIDS researchers say they still have much work to do on a vaccine against H.I.V. But the first reports of some success have raised hopes. Scientists say an experimental vaccine reduced the risk of infection in humans by thirty-one percent and was safe.

A lab technician works on blood samples at the research center in Bangkok, Thailand, where the AIDS vaccine tests took place

The study was designed to test for two abilities. One was the ability of the vaccine to prevent H.I.V. infections. The other was its ability to reduce the amount of virus in the blood of people who became infected during the study.

Volunteers received vaccinations over a period of six months and were tested for H.I.V. for an additional three years. The study began in two thousand three. It was the largest AIDS vaccine trial yet. It involved more than sixteen thousand adults in Thailand.

Half received the vaccine. The other half received a placebo, an inactive substance. The volunteers did not know which they were getting.

Seventy-four people in the placebo group became infected during the study. The researchers say that was compared with only fifty-one of those who received the vaccine.

Supachai Reks-Ngarm

Doctor Supachai Rerks-Ngarm, who led the study for the Thai Ministry of Public Health, called it a scientific breakthrough.

The Surgeon General of the United States Army sponsored the study and released the final results last week.

The National Institutes of Health also took part. Doctor Anthony Fauci at N.I.H. called the findings an important step forward. He said it represents the first time an investigational H.I.V. vaccine has shown some ability to prevent infection. But he also said additional research is needed to better understand how the vaccine reduced the risk in those individuals.

The vaccine did not lower the amount of virus in the blood of volunteers who became infected during the study.

The study was based on versions of H.I.V. commonly found in Thailand. The volunteers received a combination of two vaccines. The first, or prime, vaccine came from the Sanofi Pasteur company. The second, or booster, vaccine was developed by VaxGen. The nonprofit group Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases now has rights to it.

Neither vaccine had been successful by itself when tested earlier. More detailed results of the study are expected to be presented at an AIDS vaccine conference in Paris next month.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Caty Weaver. For more health news, go to voaspecialenglish.com. I’m Steve Ember.

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