OWN CORRESPONDENT, Nairobi | Wednesday
A YOUNG Kenyan surgeon has become one of the first volunteer subjects in a clinical trial for an Aids vaccine developed by British and Kenyan scientists with the colloboration of a group of prostitutes found to be resistant to the HI virus.
Pamela Mandela, 31, was injected with the vaccine at Nairobi University in front of a host of officials and journalists. Two other people involved in the Kenyan phase of this initial clinical trial received the vaccine a fortnight ago.
Mandela spoke of her “frustration of looking at an (Aids) patient suffer, deteriorate and eventually die, knowing there is very little you can do. With this step of being one of the first volunteers, I am fighting back at HIV/Aids and not just fearing it,” she added.
This first two-year phase of the testing process is designed to verify the safety of the vaccine.
A subsequent two-year phase, carried out on people considered to have a high risk of HIV infection, will check the immune response, while a third phase, lasting three or four years and using very high-risk subjects such as commercial sex workers and truck drivers, will establish the efficacity of the vaccine.
Thus the vaccine will not be ready for general distribution for at least eight years.
The vaccine, one of several in development around the world, specifically targets HIV-A, the most common strain of the virus in Africa, and stimulates the production of killer T-cells which stop the virus establishing itself in the body.
Its development arose from the discovery that a group of prostitutes from Nairoibi’s Majengo slum seemed immune to HIV despite repeated exposure.
Of the 3_000 women observed since 1983, 30 never contracted the HIV virus while 60 who did never developed full-blown Aids more than a decade after being infected.
Late last year a row brewed between the Kenyan and British scientists over the intellectual property of the virus after it emerged that the British had allegedly filed for patents without informing their African collaborators.
Kenyan Health Minister Sam Ongeri said the row had been resolved through a planned memorandum of understanding between Nairobi University, Oxford University’s Medical Research Centre and the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), which is financing the project. – AFP