SAfrica stops funding for AIDS vaccine research

[samanthajane13]

By MICHELLE FAUL, Associated Press Writer Michelle Faul, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jul 20, 9:23 am ET

CAPE TOWN, South Africa – South Africa has stopped funding research on an AIDS vaccine, a leading scientist said Monday, even as a major vaccine trial on humans began in the country ravaged by the world's worst AIDS epidemic.

Anna-Lise Williamson, an AIDS researcher at the University of Cape Town, told The Associated Press that the clinical vaccine trial that began Monday would continue with U.S. money. But she said South Africa's Department of Science and Technology had stopped funding her research this year and the utility Eskom's contract for funding ended last year and was not renewed.

Even though South Africa's science minister appeared at a ceremony launching the vaccine trial with Williamson and lauded her research, neither he nor Eskom immediately returned calls seeking comment about funding.

At the ceremony, one of 36 healthy volunteers was injected Monday before officials and journalists in Cape Town's Crossroads shantytown. The event was also attended by American health officials who gave technical help and manufactured the vaccine at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

"For vaccine development presently, the South African AIDS Vaccine initiative has no money," Williamson said. "If we do not continue working on this, we will never have a vaccine... it's incredibly important that we keep working."

The South African vaccine, developed at the University of Cape Town, targets the specific HIV strain that has ravaged South Africa.

During nearly 10 years of government denial and neglect, South Africa developed a staggering AIDS crisis. Around 5.2 million South Africans were living with HIV last year — the highest number of any country in the world. Young women are hardest hit, with one-third of those aged 20-to-34 infected with the virus.

AIDS vaccine researchers have met so many disappointments some activists are questioning the wisdom of continuing such expensive investments, saying the money might be better spent on prevention and education.

A new report says HIV vaccine research funding worldwide decreased for the first time since 2000, with investments of almost $1.2 billion in 2008, down 10 percent from 2007.

South Africa was also the site of the biggest setback to AIDS vaccine research, when the most promising vaccine ever, produced by Merck & Co. and tested here in 2007, found that people who got the vaccine were more likely to contract HIV than those who did not.

South African scientists working on the latest vaccine had to overcome deep skepticism from their political leaders, who had shocked the world with their unscientific pronouncements about the disease. Williamson said South Africa, at the heart of the epidemic, must press ahead with trials to test the safety of the vaccine.

"We have got the biggest ARV (anti-retroviral) rollout in the world and still hundreds of people are dying every day and getting infected everyday," she said.

Williamson's vaccine also is being tested at a trial of 12 volunteers in Boston that began earlier this year, said Anthony Mbewu, president of South Africa's government-supported Medical Research Council that shepherded the project.

"It is being very well tolerated, no adverse events, so it is going very well," Williamson said Monday.

The trial started in the U.S., partly to allay any criticism that the United States was collaborating in an AIDS vaccine that would use Africans as guinea pigs.

The government decided it was important to develop a vaccine specifically for the HIV subtype C strain that is prevalent in southern Africa "and to ensure that once developed, it would be available at an affordable price," Mbewu said.

Some 250 scientists and technicians worked on the latest vaccine project.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a leading AIDS researcher, said the South African scientists received more money from his institute's research fund than any others in the world except the U.S. The U.S. had paid to produce the vaccine.

He called it "the most important AIDS research partnership in the world."

But he warned "There are extraordinary challenges ahead," referring to the years of testing needed now that South Africa has reached the clinical trial stage.

At an international AIDS conference in Cape Town, Vice President Kgalema Motlanthe emphasized Sunday night that the clinical trials were being held "under strict ethical rules."

Mbewu said the crisis in South Africa more than justifies the expenditure on AIDS research. AIDS strikes men and women alike in Africa, where the epidemic is fueled by the many people who have sex with several people at the same time.

In the 1990s, South Africa's then-President Thabo Mbeki denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, mistrusted conventional anti-AIDS drugs and made the country a laughing stock trying to promote beets and lemon as AIDS remedies.

Williamson, a virologist, said the scientists had to fight constant controversy, including international organizations that tried to stop the state utility Eskom from funding the project. Eskom gave "huge amounts" regardless, she said.

"International organizations told Eskom that this was a terrible waste of money, that putting money into South African scientists was like backing the cart horse when they need to be backing the race horse," she said.

Even her research director told her she was wasting her time.

"Most of them just made us more determined to prove them wrong," Williamson said.

___

On the Web:

http://www.saavi.org.za, the South African AIDS Vaccine Initiative

http://www.hivresourcetracking.org.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090720/ap_on_re_af/af_south_africa_aids_vaccine

[samanthajane13]

How Homophobia Fuels Africa's AIDS Crisis
By MEGAN LINDOW Megan Lindow – 45 mins ago

New research has challenged the long-standing belief that HIV and AIDS in Africa primarily affect heterosexuals. A study published on the website of the British medical journal Lancet found that men who have sex with other men are up to 10 times more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to be infected with the virus - which suggests that the fight against AIDS on the continent may be undermined by widespread homophobia.

Researchers from Oxford University, the Population Council of Ghana and the Kenya Medical Research Institute reviewed AIDS studies conducted over the past few years and concluded that male-male sex was a major blind spot in AIDS research and policy in Africa. Men having sex with other men is far more common in Africa than is socially acknowledged, owing to widespread hostility toward homosexuality, and the phenomenon there is underreported in research and largely ignored in public-health responses to the pandemic. The researchers compiled statistics from a small but growing number of studies conducted in various African countries in recent years that included estimates of HIV prevalence among men who have sex with other men.

Many of Africa's gay communities operate largely underground. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe set the tone of the public discourse on homosexuality throughout much of the continent back in 1995, when he remarked at the Harare Book Fair that he found it "repugnant" that "... homosexuals, who offend both against the law of nature and the morals of religious beliefs espoused by our society, should have any advocates in our midst and even elsewhere in the world."

Male-male sex is a criminal offense in some 31 sub-Saharan African countries; it even draws the death penalty in a few - on the books, at least, if hardly ever in practice. In January 2009, gay-rights activists were shocked when a Senegalese judge sentenced nine gay members of an HIV/AIDS awareness group to eight-year jail terms for "indecent conduct and unnatural acts."

The sentences were subsequently overturned, but the case highlights one reason it has been so difficult to reach gay men with AIDS-prevention messages: most of them don't want to be found. One consequence of the enforced invisibility of gays, the report concluded, is that many African men live double lives in which they are far likelier to engage in risky sexual behaviors with other men, raising the danger of further spreading the virus in their heterosexual relationships.

"In countries that protect sexual minorities, those groups are able to access services and reduce their risks," the lead researcher, Adrian Smith, tells TIME. "But as long as behaviors remain criminalized and stigmatized, you're on the one hand asking a group to identify themselves and be integrated into a health system - but then the state still poses structural obstacles to prevent them doing that."

In Uganda, whose government is considering a law to criminalize the distribution of literature with homosexual content, gays are often the targets of fire-and-brimstone sermons and public rallies. Ugandan activists say that if the law is passed, it would prevent them from educating people about safe sexual behaviors - another issue highlighted in the report.

The report found that gay men are more likely than heterosexuals to engage in risky behaviors, perhaps because AIDS-prevention messages are aimed at heterosexuals. "There are many men in Africa who think that anal sex is safe, because they have never been told that it's not," says Smith.

While activists in some countries say that attacks against gays are becoming increasingly widespread and vociferous, gays are also beginning to speak out with greater determination. Gay-rights activists in Botswana, for example, have been fighting a loud and public battle to decriminalize homosexuality - an offense now punishable by up to seven years in prison. Increasingly, activists are targeting anti-gay laws as an obstacle to combating HIV/AIDS, according to reports from MASK, a gay-and-lesbian-advocacy group based in South Africa.

In most African countries, however, public opinion remains intolerant of homosexuality. Far more devastating than the laws, it is often the hostile attitudes of churches, families and communities that keep most gays in the closet, Smith says. "How do you access a population that doesn't want to be found?" he says. "That is the long-term question."

It is a problem growingly recognized by international AIDS groups and even sometimes by national governments. Senegal may have been among the more intolerant African countries by measure of social and legal tolerance of homosexuality, but it is ironically also one of the few to offer a national HIV program that specifically addresses male-male sex.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090721/wl_time/08599191175700