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Everyday nearly 15,000 people worldwide are infected with AIDS. About 7,000 die. It's a global health- care crisis. It's an epidemic.
It’s what Dr. Barney Graham wakes up to everyday. “AIDS is a daily tragedy. A crisis. Each day that we don't have a vaccine, we are losing lives,” said Dr. Graham.
Through 2000, cumulative mV/AIDS associated deaths worldwide were approximately 21.8 million -17.5 million were adults and 4.3 million were children under the age of 15. “A lot of people are working on a cure, but the best way to stop this is to prevent people from getting it,” said Graham, chief of the Clinical Trials Core and Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory of the Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research Center, NIAID.
“HTV is a smart virus. It’s smart about learning how to survive, but it’s not a very strong virus,” said Graham. HIV has a poor transmission efficiency, according to Graham. Place someone in a room with a person who has chicken pox or measles and they are likely to get infected by the initial exposure. However, HIV cannot be transmitted through casual contact or by being in the same room with another person. Even the average likelihood of contracting HIV through a sexual encounter is 1 out of 200 exposures, but Graham cautions that there are people who have been infected with just one exposure from a sexual encounter. Yet, the virus is smart in that it has strategies to hide from the immune response and can replicate itself in ways that help it evade and outpace the immune response.
With that in mind, investigators at the VRC made it their mission to outsmart the virus by successfully developing a vaccine to prevent HIV infection. Last month, they took their initial step when a 56-year-old California man came to the eighth floor clinic as the first volunteer in the first HIV vaccine protocol.
“Many people have misconceptions about how an HIV vaccine works and how it is tested,” said Nancy Barrett, recruitment and outreach specialist. “The vaccine is designed to prevent infection, so the studies are done in healthy uninfected persons. Although these kinds of products may also be tested in HIV-infected people in the future, our initial study will be done in uninfected persons.”
That’s the message they are trying to get out through their nationwide advertising campaign to recruit 21 volunteers for this phase one trial. "Currently, we have two people enrolled in the study, and we are in the process of screening others,” said Grace Kelly, RN, MSN, research nurse specialist and coordinator of the study. “I am very gratified by the strong support from the local community.”
The vaccine causes the immune system to produce antibodies or special immune system blood cells that may suppress or kill HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Because there are no five, killed or weakened forms of HTV in the vaccine, it is impossible to catch the disease from the vaccine. In fact, “We believe the needleless injection system and the nature of the product being tested will not even cause much of a sore arm,” said Graham.