InterPress News Service (IPS); Thursday, 16 January 1997.
Rolando Napoles

"There is always the fear that by putting ourselves in contact with the vaccine we are going to come into contact with the virus," said Morales, a young researcher in the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center (CIGB) in Havana.

Similar concerns were voiced by the families of most of the 24 young scientists participating in an experiment which has made Cuba one of the few countries where an AIDS vaccine is being tested on human beings.

These young people are the researchers themselves, and the tests, they say, are a necessary part of the process in order to prove the effectiveness of the medicine now the basic tests on animals have been carried out.

"There is no animal model which serves to evaluate an immune reaction, because none of them develop the illness," said official Communist part daily Juventud Rebelde.

Other countries, like France and the United States, have developed other candidates as a vaccine against AIDS since the virus was first discovered in 1984.

Some 22 million people worldwide are infected with the HIV virus, and these numbers are expected to swell to 50 million by the year 2000. The U.N. program to control the spread of the disease reported that 6,000 new people are infected by the virus every day.

Reports from the Health Education Center said there were 1,400 known HIV carriers in Cuba, mainly between the ages of 19 and 29.

Two U.S. companies arrived at phase two of the three-stage vaccination approval process two years ago, and the French are now also at the same point.

"The U.S. companies could not go ahead as out of a total of 2,000 people vaccinated, nearly 20 caught the virus when they came into contact with infected people or material," said Carlos Duarte, head of the Cuban experiment and one of the volunteers.

Cuba started its investigation in 1992, and Duarte said the program is currently in phase one -- the clinical stage -- where the immune reaction is evaluated and tolerance to the compound can begin to be measured.

"The most common adverse reactions are pain at the site of inoculation, inflammation or the reddening of this zone and, in some cases, fever," he said.

In his opinion the human study would allow for the correction of possible insufficiencies in this Cuban preparation. The serum would then need to be tried on a further 200 people, and then on wider at-risk groups in order to see if the vaccine offers protection.

This research was kept secret for several years, but in late 1994 Dr. Gustavo Sierra, sub-director of the Finlay Institute, revealed that Cuba was hoping to have a vaccine before the year 2000.

"If we are not among the first to reach our goal, we will not be the last. We are not going to stop until we get it," he said.

This project forms part of a vaccine finding program which already achieved one world exclusive by creating the meningococcus B vaccine used successfully in Cuba and other nations of Latin America.

Sierra said, "The Cuban proposal against AIDS could allow for us to obtain large quantities of the product in a relatively economic way and facilitates a precise design expressed in variations and combinations."

"We are dealing with a recombining protein produced by a gene created artificially in the laboratory on the basis of the genes which codify for the different types of HIV virus which cause the illness in different parts of the world," explained Duarte.

Its inventors believe it is one of the most promising proposals of the present, although the Cuban authorities are wary of raising false hopes.

"What is absolutely sure is that none of these young people will catch HIV," said Sierra, "because the vaccine does not contain even a fragment of the live virus. It is purely a laboratory product."

Despite this, the families of some of the volunteers are still worried as their loved ones await a further three doses of the vaccine.

The Ministry of Public Health is creating an identity card for the project volunteers in order to clear up any possible confusion.

Another researcher and volunteer, Rolando Pajon, said there is always a lack of understanding on this sort of issue from family members who ask, "Why you and not someone else?"

"If we don't commit ourselves to the fight for future life, who will?" asked his colleague, Rolando Paez.

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