A VACCINE which holds back HIV developing into AIDS has been devised by scientists in Barcelona's Hospital Clínic, who say this is 'just the start' in the ongoing search for a cure.
The jab's effects last 12 months, meaning it will need to be repeated, but will lessen the need for HIV-positive patients to take immune-boosting drugs.
These have to be taken for life and are expensive, difficult to acquire outside western civilisation and can have unpleasant side-effects as well as causing long-term, permanent damage.
A 19-year-old girl in Madrid infected at birth by her mother – who died when she was two – says medication left her with broken bones on one occasion because it stripped the calcium from her body.
Such drugs are in themselves a massive step forward for a condition that guaranteed premature death just 30 years ago, but for the majority of sufferers – who live in the third world – access to them is limited or non-existent.
But a vaccine is cheap and longer-lasting, say researchers behind the discovery.
“We're not there yet, but we're getting close,” says Dr Josep María Gatell, head of the infectious illnesses department at Hospital Clínic, who calls the achievement 'a very significant step' towards the ultimate aim, that of eradicating HIV and AIDS altogether.
Around 150,000 people in Spain – of whom 30,000 live in Catalunya, Barcelona's region – are HIV positive.
Worldwide, the figure is in excess of 30 million.
In poor and developing countries, blood transfusions and needle-sharing among drug-users are frequent causes, and lack of available birth control means many mothers in these nations – particularly African countries – pass the condition on to their children in the womb.
This is more frequent in primitive cultures where women are considered subordinate to men and expected to serve them sexually without question, or where promiscuity is the norm.
In the western world, HIV is more likely to be sexually-transmitted, with infected men having a 90 per cent risk of passing on the condition and infected women 10 per cent.
Whilst once considered to be almost exclusively a disease affecting gay men, heterosexual women are just as much at risk and figures in recent years have shown that there are more HIV-positive women who have had a high number of casual sexual partners without using protection than HIV-positive homosexual men.
But huge progress in the last 30 years means it is even possible for a man and woman to have a baby free of HIV where one or both of the parents are infected.
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