In Brief
Oct 25, 2009
DOCTORS who carried out a study showing a vaccine prevented some HIV infections released details of their findings recently and said careful review showed they held up. Details of the study showed the experimental vaccine prevented nearly one-third of inf
AIDS vaccine may have worked
DOCTORS who carried out a study showing a vaccine prevented some HIV infections released details of their findings recently and said careful review showed they held up. Details of the study showed the experimental vaccine prevented nearly one-third of infections among 16,000 ordinary Thai volunteers.
“That is a validation of the results,†said Dr. Jerome Kim, a US Army colonel, who led the trial. The vaccine is a combination of Sanofi-Pasteur’s ALVAC canary pox/HIV vaccine and the failed HIV vaccine AIDSVAX, made by a San Francisco company called VaxGen and now owned by the nonprofit Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases.
The trial, sponsored by the US government and the Thai Ministry of Public Health, cut the risk of infection by 31.2% over three years, according to one analysis of the data.
Dirty hands kill thousands
A single doctor or nurse with dirty hands can undo all the good work of an entire hospital staff trained to carefully wash their hands to prevent the spread of infection, French researchers have said.
This is especially likely to happen when a hospital is overwhelmed with a disaster or a pandemic of infectious diseases and staff are reassigned to cope, the team at France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research or INSERM said.
Patients often get infected in hospitals with a variety of germs. Staff who fail to properly wash their hands are often to blame for these infections.
These infections cost billions of dollars to treat and thousands of patients die from them every year.
Reuters
DOCTORS who carried out a study showing a vaccine prevented some HIV infections released details of their findings recently and said careful review showed they held up. Details of the study showed the experimental vaccine prevented nearly one-third of infections among 16,000 ordinary Thai volunteers.
“That is a validation of the results,†said Dr. Jerome Kim, a US Army colonel, who led the trial. The vaccine is a combination of Sanofi-Pasteur’s ALVAC canary pox/HIV vaccine and the failed HIV vaccine AIDSVAX, made by a San Francisco company called VaxGen and now owned by the nonprofit Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases.
The trial, sponsored by the US government and the Thai Ministry of Public Health, cut the risk of infection by 31.2% over three years, according to one analysis of the data.
Dirty hands kill thousands
A single doctor or nurse with dirty hands can undo all the good work of an entire hospital staff trained to carefully wash their hands to prevent the spread of infection, French researchers have said.
This is especially likely to happen when a hospital is overwhelmed with a disaster or a pandemic of infectious diseases and staff are reassigned to cope, the team at France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research or INSERM said.
Patients often get infected in hospitals with a variety of germs. Staff who fail to properly wash their hands are often to blame for these infections.
These infections cost billions of dollars to treat and thousands of patients die from them every year.
Reuters