Country refuses to
let red tape stall war on what it calls a national emergency
Claire Keeton: Entebbe, Uganda
Every night after
dinner, one of the world's top HIV vaccine researchers, Dr
Pontiano Kaleebu of Uganda, leaves his family and goes back to
his laboratory.
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 considered a national
emergency.
Uganda is not only
the leader in Aids prevention in Africa but 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 non-profit organisation, when he
addressed the 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.
It took the Ugandan
government just six months to give the go-ahead for tests on
the vaccine which was developed by the University of Oxford,
the University of Nairobi and IAVI - with Kaleebu as the
principal investigator.
The same sub-type-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 of a vaccine in
South Africa for the dominant sub-type-C strain.
"Developing a
successful vaccine needs participants in many trials,"
explained Kaleebu, who works at the IAVI centre in Entebbe,
which was officially opened on Friday.
This week, three
HIV vaccine volunteers visited the centre for their third of
four injections, a process expected to last 18 months. Until
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 , he says: "HIV/Aids is an
enemy to our nation and we must attack it."
The first phase of
the trial tests the vaccine's safety on a small group of
volunteers. The second phase, with a larger group, tests
dosages and whether the vaccine triggers the appropriate
immune response.
Kaleebu estimates
that about 70 phase one and two 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 vaccine tested in
the world. This is a political disaster," Berkley told the
Ugandan parliament.