Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1997. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - Monday October 27 3:54 PM EST
Ruben Alabastro

They said tests would be voluntary and conducted among people most exposed to the danger of acquiring AIDS, such as prostitutes and intravenous drug users.

"There's a good possibility that the first vaccine efficacy trial ever conducted in the world will be conducted in Asia and specifically Thailand," said Dr. Margaret Johnston, scientific director of the U.S.-based International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).

An efficacy trial is intended to show if the vaccine works on humans, Johnston said.

She said it was hard to say exactly when such a mass trial could be carried out because initial tests on small groups, to find out how safe the vaccine was, had not been completed.

"But if everything is safe and everything works...the first efficacy trial could start in Thailand perhaps in the year 2000, perhaps," she told a news conference.

"That's going to require a lot of factors...The trial itself will take three or four years so we could have a vaccine in 10 years."

"It will probably involve many thousands of people, high risk individuals...The numbers will probably be in several thousands," Johnston said.

IAVI is a private group of scientists and medical experts trying to develop a vaccine that would immunize people against the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that can lead to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

About 23 million people were estimated to be carrying the HIV/AIDS virus as of end 1996 and some experts said the number could double by 2000.

No vaccine has been developed to combat HIV or cure AIDS itself despite years of research costing millions of dollars, experts said.

World leaders have joined in the anti-AIDS campaign. President Clinton in May called for the development of an AIDS vaccine within the decade.

Prasert Thongcharoen, a Thai virologist and director of the Collaborating Center on AIDS of the World Health Organization (WHO), said his country was willing to host the first anti-HIV vaccine mass.

Thailand, which has about 800,000 HIV cases as of last year, is one of the countries hardest hit by the epidemic.

Prasert said many Thais were willing to volunteer for such a trial.

"We could not wait for Western countries to do this for us. The problem (in) the West is less and less but not in our country, not in Asia," he told Reuters.

Disclosure about the proposed mass test coincided with controversy over some AIDS trials for pregnant women in Africa in which subjects received only placebos and no drugs.

The trials were designed to see if drug treatments could stop pregnant women from passing on the HIV virus to their babies. Some groups criticized the trials saying it was unfair to withhold potentially life-saving therapy from anybody.

Johnston said the mass trial would involve dividing volunteers from high-risk sectors into two groups which would be intensively counseled on how to avoid the infection.

One group would get the vaccine and the other would not.

"You follow them over a period of years and see if the group that got the vaccine have less infections than the group that didn't get the vaccine. Then you know that the vaccine works."

Johnston did not say if the two groups would be told beforehand that one of them would not get the vaccine.

A study released Monday showed HIV infections, already threatening to hit Asia on a massive scale, were growing fastest in some of its least accessible regions around the notorious heroin-producing Golden Triangle.

"Mobile populations in areas such as the Golden Triangle...are highly vulnerable to HIV infection," the Monitoring of AIDS Pandemic (MAP) network said, referring to the region infamous as the world's chief source of opium.

MAP, which groups more than 100 HIV and AIDS experts from 40 countries, issued its findings at the Manila conference.

The Golden Triangle comprises parts of Burma, Thailand and Laos but the report said also affected were nearby border regions of India and China as well as the Mekong delta in Cambodia and Vietnam.

It pointed to three factors behind the rise -- unsafe sex with prostitutes, injected drugs and increased mobility of the population.

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