Howard Barrell
A group of leading South African scientists is putting together a R50- million project to develop a vaccine to fight what Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and others have called the country’s gravest threat, the HIV/Aids epidemic.
The scientists believe South Africa has a window of opportunity in which to develop a vaccine which can win the war against the strain of the virus currently devastating Africa.
The Department of Health, various science councils and research bodies in South Africa and abroad, life assurance companies like Old Mutual, and several other local companies have expressed an interest and are evaluating the project and how it can best be supported.
One of the driving forces behind the campaign to get the project off the ground, Dr Walter Prozesky, told the Mail & Guardian that insufficient attention had been paid in the past to developing an Aids vaccine.
“Traditional prevention efforts can slow the spread of HIV/Aids, but only an accessible vaccine can bring an end to the epidemic. Yet vaccine development remains a low political and social priority. We are now changing that,” said Prozesky, one of South Africa’s leading virologists who steps down as president of the Medical Research Council at the end of the year.
“I plan to give the project all my time and enthusiasm after my retirement,” he said. “We in this country have the expertise to deal with every stage of development of an HIV/Aids vaccine. We have the epidemiologists, the virologists, the molecular biologists, the immunologists and the clinicians,” he added.
The health department has set up a task group to evaluate the initiative and it plans to establish a bigger body soon to liaise with those involved. The scientists are now awaiting decisive input from the government before they can move to get the project up and running properly.
Prozesky and 50-odd medical and scientific colleagues who have been discussing the initiative at meetings around the country in recent weeks estimate the project will cost about R10-million a year over five years.
They are now looking to raise the necessary funds from the health department, various research bodies, private companies and other sources. The scientists argue the R50-million being asked for is a drop in the ocean compared to the benefits a vaccine could bring in terms of lives saved and reduction of medical and welfare costs.
The latest statistics for South Africa show that, on average, 1 500 people a day are being infected. That means one South African is contracting the disease each minute of each day.
Eskom, the electricity generator, is one South African business that is concerned about the effect the epidemic will have on it. It is one of the more enthusiastic backers of the South African Aids Vaccine Initiative, as the project is called.
Eskom estimates that if the current rate of spread of HIV/Aids continues between now and the year 2012, the sickness, absenteeism and other disruptions that will result will cost the company R4,8-billion.
Prozesky says scientific advances have “created a sense of optimism within the scientific community that a vaccine can indeed be developed”.
He and his colleagues are in close contact with efforts in the United States and elsewhere to develop HIV vaccines. These include HIVNet, the international network committed to testing HIV vaccines which has two test centres in South Africa.
“South Africa must improve its efforts to prevent the disease and to make people aware of it, as well as to mitigate the consequences of infection. But at the end of the day, South Africa needs an HIV vaccine if it is to have any hope of ending the epidemic,” he says.
“Yet there is currently no effort specifically to develop appropriate vaccines for South Africa, where we have a different strain of HIV from what we find in the US and Europe. We can do it. But it requires commitment to a major national effort.
“There is no other country in sub-Saharan Africa that has the scientific and industrial capacity to make a vaccine for Africa.”
He said he and his colleagues were looking to the government to provide overall strategic direction and support. But the best way to take the initiative forward would be to form an independent, non- profit-making company with a single mandate to develop a vaccine, of which the chair should probably be President Nelson Mandela.