There's an uproar of excitement within the medical community surrounding a "modestly successful HIV vaccine experiment," which resulted in "the first HIV vaccine candidate to successfully reduce the risk of HIV infection in humans," according to CNN.com.
The testing, which was conducted in Thailand and involved 15 thousand HIV-negative participants (the largest HIV experiment to date), resulted in more than a 31 percent decrease of infection in the HIV vaccine regimen group compared to the placebo group. In other words, 51 people in the vaccine group eventually contracted HIV, compared with 74 in the placebo group. Colonel Jerome Kim, who is the HIV vaccines product manager for the U.S. Army, told CNN that, given the failures of the previous vaccine trials (which seemed to increase the risk of contracting the disease), this is a breakthrough.
According to a study conducted by the University of New South Wales in
Sydney, Australia, the heterosexual HIV transmission rate in Thailand
(where subtype E predominates) is fifty-fold higher than that observed
in USA and Europe (where subtype B predominates).The 6 different vaccines used on the non-placebo group targeted the specific strains of HIV prominent in Thailand.