HIV Vaccine Research: What You Should Know

With the coming of World AIDS Day (December 1st), I wanted to let people know about the current efforts underway to develop a safe and effective preventive vaccine against HIV. I came to learn about HIV vaccine research when I worked for my former employer in Rochester, NY. We had received a grant to do a community level education campaign to let people know about HIV vaccine research and to answer some of their basic questions about HIV vaccines.

Many people of color, especially Blacks are resistant to participating in vaccine research, particularly when dealing with a stigmatizing disease such as HIV. Not too distant history gives us examples of the medical communities abuse of Black participants, the most notable being the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments that took place in the early 1900's. Since that time, research has come a long way in protecting humans from any kind of abuse and mistreatment such as what happened in the Tuskegee experiments. In spite of the advances in protecting humans from harm, Black's continue to mistrust the medical community, which is one of the biggest barriers to getting more Black's involved in HIV vaccine research.

As we all know, in the U.S. HIV/AIDS is hitting Blacks the hardest, especially Black Men who have Sex with Men (MSM). The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has a website dedicated to information about HIV vaccines. Here is some information about how HIV vaccine trials work:

• Anyone who is interested in participating must go through an extensive informed consent process so that they are aware of what the process entails and can have all of their questions answered.
• Pregnant women and anyone under the age of 18 are automatically excluded from participating.
• Everyone who makes it past the informed consent process has to undergo a physical including blood work. They have to make sure that anyone participating doesn't have any diseases that may interfere with the vaccine process, such as having HIV or presence of an autoimmune disorder, such as Lupus etc.
• The HIV preventive vaccine itself isn't like most vaccines, which are killed virus or weakened virus as this would be unethical. Instead it's completely synthetic (made up) and resembles the actual HIV virus, but it cannot cause HIV nor sickness.
• The way the vaccine works is to trick the body into thinking HIV is present so the body will develop an immune response to it. The hope is that if an effective vaccine were created, a person who came into contact with the actual HIV virus would already have the antibodies present to kill the virus before it can infect any cells.
  

These are some basic highlights on how HIV vaccines work. More information can be found in this fact sheet about MSM on NIAID's website. They also have fact sheets on women, Hispanics (English and Spanish) and for health care providers. In addition they have a brochure called "HIV Vaccines Explained: Making HIV Vaccines a Reality"

It would be a wonderful thing if we were able to find a preventive vaccine for HIV as this could help to eradicate HIV altogether. In fact this may be the only way to do so because those of us working in HIV prevention have been educating people for years on how HIV is contracted, yet people still catch the disease for various reasons. If we could develop a safe and effective preventive vaccine, then we could help keep this from happening. The only way this can be a possibility though is if more African American's participate in HIV vaccine trials. In order for a trial to be effective, person's from a variety of ethnic backgrounds need to participate to ensure that if a vaccine were developed, it would work in all races of people as apparently there can be genetic differences in how certain vaccines work.

Please take the time out to educate yourself about HIV Vaccine research and trials. There also may be a vaccine trial in the area that you live. I know there is one currently here in Philadelphia which is being operated by the University of Pennsylvania. Just think, if a preventive vaccine for HIV can be developed, HIV could possibly become a completely preventable disease such as polio or measles, mumps and rubella are in developed countries. Please pass this information on to others who need to be educated about HIV vaccine research. We all have to give a little and take what we perceive as risks for the greater good of mankind.