Vaccine of Hope

A huge study taking place in South Africa is being hailed as a major step in the fight against HIV/Aids.

- Gabisile Ngcobo

IN THE beginning it was all anybody could talk about – a terrifying new disease that sapped people of life, wasting their bodies and minds until they became skeletons waiting for the relief of death.

But as the decades passed it became easier to turn a blind eye to the scourge of HIV/Aids – it was just so grim, so hopeless. Yet the statistics are impossible to ignore: 70 million people infected since the beginning of the epidemic, 35 million dead, more than 25 million children left orphaned, hundreds of thousands of new infections every day.

And leading the world infection rate is South Africa where 1 000 people contract the virus every day and seven million live with HIV – despite tireless efforts by Aids workers and medical researchers to reduce the scale of the scourge.

But a fresh wind of hope and excitement is blowing through the research world since the launch of a study that’s been hailed as a game-changer and “the final nail in the coffin” of the virus. And even a public hardened to the devastation of the disease is paying attention to this.

Called HVTN 702, the study was launched on World Aids Day on 1 December and has been labelled by researchers as the largest and most advanced HIV clinical trial to take place in South Africa.

More than 5 000 adult volunteers from all walks of life have joined forces with researchers to participate in the trial, which is a follow-up to the one in Thailand that showed an advanced new vaccine reduced the rate of infection by more than 30 percent in three years.

“We’ve now developed and moved from a positive outcome in Thailand and we’re hopeful for a positive outcome in South Africa,” says Professor Gita Ramjee, director of the HIV prevention and research unit at the South African Medical Research Council (MRC).