AIDS vaccine trial questioned

It is an emotional cycle familiar to most AIDS-vaccine researchers: the high of finally making measurable headway against HIV, followed by the crushing low of discovering that the virus has once again found a way to elude them.

It happened again last Saturday when researchers learned that the first ever successful AIDS vaccine turned out not to be the triumph they had originally hoped. In September, scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US Army announced the results of an AIDS-vaccine study in Thailand involving more than 16,000 volunteers. The data showed that the new vaccine had protected 31 per cent of inoculated participants from becoming infected with HIV. But a closer look at a subset of the study's volunteers now reveals that the vaccine in fact protected only 26 per cent of the people who received it.

The difference is small but critical because the new success rate of 26 per cent falls below the threshold for statistical significance. That means that the odds of being protected from infection by the AIDS vaccine may be no better than chance. The full story is reported on www.time.com.

Source: Time.com