Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - 9 July 1996
Cynthia Osterman / Reuters

The mounting impatience of the Third World, home to 90 percent of the 21.8 million people infected with the HIV virus, erupted into the open at the 11th International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver.

Many researchers believe vaccines, which eradicated smallpox and should wipe out polio within a few years, offer the best hope of banishing AIDS. The conference has been dominated by optimism over promising new drugs to treat the killer disease. But at a cost of $15,000 a year these new drugs are hopelessly out of reach for the vast majority of AIDS sufferers.

Edward Mbidde, an AIDS researcher from Uganda, expressed frustration on Tuesday that no AIDS vaccine has been deemed worthy of large-scale human testing despite more than a decade of research. Industrialised countries have opted to wait until experimental vaccines are refined to the point that they work in the large majority of test subjects, he said.

But poor nations are so desperate they want to push forward with large-scale testing if experimental vaccines show promise of protecting even just a fraction of the AIDS-infected, he said.

"For us, anything that will make a dent in the epidemic is worthwhile," Mbidde said. "If we just sit and wait for someone to make a decision (to move ahead with testing) and see our people devastated, I don't think we are doing our duty as a nation."

That view is rejected by many scientists, who say rushing ahead poses enormous ethical and health risks. In the absence of a good vaccine candidate, large-scale tests would be a waste of money, they argue.

They also fear that offering a vaccine with only partial protection might make matters worse by lulling people into thinking that they do not need to practice safe sex or avoid other high-risk activities.

Research presented in Vancouver underscored how far scientists are from a safe and effective vaccine. About three dozen HIV vaccines are being investigated in small-scale clinical trials around the world. Some have succeeded in provoking immune response but critical gaps remain in researchers' knowledge.

The United States announced on Tuesday it would sponsor a new vaccine research programme in collaboration with industry and increase funding for the field by $7 million next year to $116 million. "We will never give up our fight to develop (an AIDS) vaccine and find a cure," Donna Shalala, U.S. secretary of health, told the Vancouver conference.

But Dr. Seth Berkley of the Rockefeller Foundation said virtually all spending on vaccine research has been targeted at the strains of HIV found in industrialised countries while less than $5 million a year is being spent worldwide to develop vaccines specifically for poor nations.

That leaves poor countries to fend for themselves -- a situation many reject as unacceptable as well as short-sighted.

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