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April 09, 2003

U.S. IMMUNIZATION NEWS

"Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Seropositivity Among Uninfective HIV Vaccine Recipients"

Journal of Infectious Diseases (www.journals.uchicago.edu/JID/home.html)

(03/15/2003) Vol. 187, No. 6, P. 879; Ackers, Marta-Louise; Parekh, Bharat; Evans, Thomas G.

More than 10,000 patients have since 1987 been vaccinated with HIV preventive vaccine constructs in an attempt to derive some kind of anti-HIV activity.  Many of the vaccines have sparked antibody production against HIV to a level detectable by enzyme immunoassays, rapid tests, and Western blots, with serum results indicating that the vaccines caused reaction and infection with HIV constructs.  The frequency of such a reaction among all patients, however, has not been determined.  To determine the rate of vaccine effectiveness among HIV-free patients, researchers tested serum samples from 461 participants in Phase I/II HIV vaccine trials in the United States with six serologic screening tests, with reactive specimens further tested with Western blot.  In all, 490 serum specimens from the 461 patients were tested.  At least one test registered reaction for 100 patients, or 20.4 percent of the group, with 65 patients or 13 percent confirmed by Western blot.  All of the Western blot confirmations were determined among patients who were vaccinated with canarypox or vaccinia vaccine with or without HIV envelope glycoprotein, and no positive Western blot result was found among recipients of glycoprotein 120 subunit vaccine.  Moreover, the scientists found that patients were more likely to be misclassified as the complexity of the vaccine in testing rose.

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