Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1994. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - Saturday, December 17, 1994
Dr. Peter Piot of Belgium, appointed this week to head the new U.N. program to combat the disease, said tests will begin within two years.
The World Health Organization has just completed a master plan for the tests of two vaccines, Piot told a news conference. He said other vaccines are being developed, but are still only in the laboratory or are being tested on animals and are years away from being tested on humans.
He said the vaccination program showed promise in the long term, but that U.N. efforts to fight the disease would have to shift emphasis from prevention to helping Third World countries cope as longtime carriers of the virus start developing AIDS.
Officials in the U.N.'s World Health Organization said the test groups were selected because they were very likely to be exposed to a strain of the AIDS virus for which a vaccine had been developed and because researchers could track them.
At least 3,000 and 4,000 people will take part and possibly as many as 20,000, he said.
Christopher Powell, spokesman for WHO's Global Program on AIDS, said the vaccines to be tested, known as GP-120, are safe to use on humans and had already been given to small-scale trials on people in Europe and the United States.
Researchers need to conduct the tests in countries with a high incidence of AIDS. Developed countries like the United States have too low a relative rate to permit efficient testing, Piot said.
WHO estimates that about one in 250 people in the United States is infected with the AIDS virus, while in northern Thailand one in five young men and one in 12 young women has HIV.
About 90 percent of all infections are occurring in the developing world. The largest number of estimated AIDS cases -- more than 2.5 million -- is in sub-Saharan Africa, which also has more than 10 million adults infected with HIV.
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