Posted on 11/28/2004 7:21:54 PM PST by conservativeinferno
BEIJING (Reuters) - China has approved human testing of a locally developed potential AIDS vaccine, the official Xinhua news agency said Friday, just days before World AIDS Day.
Officials have pledged to speed up the approval process for anti-AIDS drugs in China, where the United Nations has warned that the number of people with AIDS could rise to 10 million by 2010 unless serious steps are taken to fight the epidemic.
"Researchers infected a monkey with the AIDS virus after injecting the compound vaccine into its body, and found no abnormal reactions occurred," Xinhua quoted the State Food and Drug Administration of China as saying.
The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative has said dozens of potential vaccines are being tested and more than 70 human clinical trials have taken place although none had yet promised to conquer the virus.
China, which has been reluctant to acknowledge the spread of the disease, has also pledged to strengthen surveillance of HIV/AIDS and to begin nationwide HIV testing among people who have sold blood.
Whole villages in the central province of Henan were infected when millions sold blood to unsanitary clinics in the 1990s, although authorities say the country has fewer than 1 million HIV carriers and about 80,000 with full-blown AIDS.
"We will also search for HIV carriers among prisoners and people in the drug abstention house," Xinhua quoted Vice Health Minister Gao Qiang as saying.
Last year on World AIDS Day, Premier Wen Jiabao shook hands with AIDS patients at a Beijing hospital in a symbolic display of commitment to fighting the disease.
But efforts to step up AIDS prevention remain shackled by politics and by conservative attitudes toward sex.
Last week, university authorities halted a plan to distribute free condoms on Beijing campuses, saying students should be educated against pre-marital sex.
An AIDS vaccine already exists. It's known as not having unprotected sex with a person whom you are not sure is free of disease.
You might want to cut back on shooting drugs as well...
Interesting wording.
I thought monkeys were nominally immune to "HIV"; they are susceptible to "SIV". Therefore, if a monkey is injected with AIDS virus and nothing happens, that's normal even without the vaccine.
If a monkey can be expected to get AIDS if injected with HIV, and a monkey is injected with HIV, and gets AIDS, then that, too, is "not abnormal".
Thank you, Bill Clinton, for the lessons in parsing speech.
An AIDS vaccine would help every person who comes in contact with infected bodily fluids, including doctors, nurses, police and any other hospital worker or health care professional. Though unprotected sex and IV drug use are the major contributors to the transmission of AIDS, accidents can and do happen when people come in contact with contaminated bodily fluids.
I, for one, hope that this becomes available to help protect those who protect us.
Consider that western researchers have to find "at risk" populations and then observe them for years after administrating the vaccine to determine it's effectiveness. Chinese researchers on the other hand can just take a prisoner and administer the vaccine and then inject them with HIV to quickly and directly test the effectiveness of that vaccine.
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