Originally published February 26 2006
AIDS conference addresses the need for a vaccine to halt the spread of HIV
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
At an international AIDS conference, Bette Korber, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, spoke of the challenge to create an HIV vaccine to prevent the transmission of the virus.
Twenty-five years after AIDS was discovered, scientists are still struggling to find a vaccine to thwart the virus or drugs to cure it.
Medical experts from around the world said at an international conference on AIDS this week that securing a vaccine or effective treatment has proven elusive despite exhaustive, costly efforts.
"Creating a vaccine to prevent transmission of HIV, or at least to limit its pathogenic and epidemic potential, is one of the great challenges of our time," Bette Korber, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, told the conference.
Some 3,900 medical experts from around the world met this week in Denver, Colorado to assess efforts to combat AIDS at the annual conference on retroviruses and opportunistic infections (CROI).
Other researchers said fresh approaches were needed given the failure of current drugs to treat AIDS and the serious side effects produced by them.
"We have drugs that simply do not cure it because of the virus reservoir," O'Brien said, adding that there are "emerging side effects" affecting the heart and metabolism.
More than 90 percent of infections occur in developing countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, where grinding poverty and a lack of medical services hamper access to anti-viral treatments that could contain the effects of the pandemic.
One of the most promising lines of research for a vaccine would detect virus protein sequences, or epitopes, that remain the same across various strains of the virus.
This research employs software to try to identify the epitopes capable of triggering an immune system response.
A team of medical researchers also told the conference that treatment for AIDS patients using powerful drug cocktails proved more successful when started earlier.
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