Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - Sunday July 27, 2003
Claire Keeton : Entebbe, Uganda
Kaleebu - like the Ugandan government - urgently wants to find a vaccine for HIV/Aids, which has infected about 1.5 million of his country's 26 million people and is seen as a national emergency.
Uganda is not only the leader in Aids prevention in Africa but it was also the first country to test an Aids vaccine, said Dr Seth Berkley, president and chief executive of the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), a nonprofit organisation, in his address to an attentive Ugandan parliamentary Aids committee on Thursday .
Uganda was the continent's pioneer of human trials of an Aids vaccine in 1999.
In February, it launched a second human trial using a vaccine from the HIV strain most common in East Africa.
The Ugandan government gave approval within six months to test the vaccine -- developed by the the University of Oxford, the University of Nairobi and IAVI - with Kaleebu as the principal investigator.
The same subtype-A vaccine is being tested simultaneously in Kenya and Britain. "Kenya learnt from Uganda and moved forward quickly," said Berkley.
In South Africa, IAVI is still waiting for approval to test the vaccine after submitting an application to the Medicines Control Council about 18 months ago.
Last month the council approved the first HIV human trial to test a vaccine in South Africa for the dominant subtype-C strain.
"Developing a successful vaccine needs participants in many trials," explains Kaleebu, who works at the IAVI centre in Entebbe, which was officially opened on Friday.
This week, three HIV vaccine volunteers visited it for their third injection out of four, in a process expected to last 18 months. Up to now there has been 100% compliance by the 35 volunteers in the trial (which needs another 15).
One of them, 34-year-old Paul Wetaka, is volunteering for the second time for an Aids vaccine. A soldier by profession, he says: "HIV/Aids is an enemy to our nation and we must attack it."
The first phase of a trial tests the vaccine's safety on a small group of volunteers. The second phase, with a larger group, tests correct dosages and whether the vaccine triggers the appropriate immune response.
Kaleebu estimates that about 70 Phase 1 and 2 trials have taken place since the first HIV vaccine trial was launched in the late 1980s. Thailand is conducting the third and final phase of a trial.
"Twenty-two years into the epidemic, there has only been one [HIV] vaccine tested in the world. This is a political disaster," Berkley declared in the Ugandan parliament.
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