ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 13, 1996 TAG: 9602130116
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BETHESDA, MD.
SOURCE: Associated Press
Some 500 American and French volunteers will begin testing a potential AIDS vaccine next year in a special partnership between drug companies and the U.S. government to speed the search for an inoculation.
Nobody knows if or how well this two-dose experiment will work - and any AIDS vaccine is still years away from approval, the government's top AIDS researcher emphasized Monday. But Dr. Anthony Fauci said the AIDS threat is so great that the United States must accept a less-than-perfect vaccine.
``God bless us if we get 85 percent effectiveness,'' Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at an international conference on AIDS vaccines.
``This is a preventive approach,'' he explained. If an AIDS vaccine is developed, ``people should learn to change their behavior and if, as in human nature, they slip, [the vaccine] will decrease their chances of getting infected.''
About 25 experimental vaccines are in human testing worldwide, mostly in the very first stage that determines if the vaccine itself hurts people. The few that have finished Phase II trials in several hundred volunteers found some protective responses, but none has yet been effective enough to do final testing in thousands of people.
LENGTH: Short : 34 linesby CNB