South Africa launched clinical trials of the first AIDS vaccine created by a developing country Monday. The new vaccine targets the specific HIV strain that has ravaged South Africa's people and produced the worst AIDS epidemic in the world. “It has been a very, very hard journey,” lead scientist Professor Anna-Lise Williamson of the University of Cape Town said at Monday's ceremony, attended by American health officials who gave technical help and manufactured the vaccine at the US National Institutes of Health. During nearly 10 years of 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. Williamson said she sees no choice for South Africa, at the heart of the epidemic, but to press ahead with trials to test the safety of the vaccine in humans. At a ceremony in Cape Town's Crossroads shantytown, one of the first of 36 healthy volunteers was injected Monday before officials and journalists. The same vaccine 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. The trial may have been started in the US to allay any criticism that the United States was collaborating in an AIDS vaccine that would use Africans as guinea pigs. “It is being very well tolerated, no adverse events, so it is going very well,” Williamson said. 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. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US 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 US. 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.” The field of AIDS vaccine research is so filled with disappointments some activists are questioning the wisdom of continuing such expensive investments, saying the money might be better spent on prevention and education. Interestingly, Williamson said that “for vaccine development presently, the South African AIDS Vaccine initiative has no money.” Her revelation came as a new report said HIV vaccine research funding decreased for the first time since 2000, with investments of almost $1.2 billion in 2008, down 10 percent from 2007.
