LONDON: It will take at least another 10 years of research and vaccine trials before there is any hope of finding an effective response to AIDS. That is the grim consensus of researchers, who believe death rates from the disease will inevitably rise from their current 3 million a year to more than 10 million.

A total of 70 million people, the majority of them young adults on whom families and economies depend, are likely to die in that period: the equivalent of six Twin Towers disasters every day for the next decade.

Such appalling attrition raises a bleak, dispiriting question: just how long do we have to wait before we can rid the world of Aids? Few researchers are predicting anything but a long time.

“Aids is the real global terrorist and it is going to be a very long haul before we get on top of it,” said Prof Robin Weiss, director of research at the Institute of Cancer Research, London.

In recent years, highly effective combinations of anti-Aids drugs led to a 66 per cent decrease in Aids deaths in the West. But these expensive, awkward to administer treatments are of little help in the developing world where a cheap, once-in-a- lifetime vaccine offers the only real hope of halting the epidemic.

The problem is that HIV attacks by infecting the very immune cells that are supposed to protect our bodies. In addition, the virus mutates and changes its outer coating, the usual target for vaccines, at very high rates. It can also lie dormant in the body for many years, ready to re-infect.

This has not stopped scientists from trying to develop vaccines, although most are given little chance of success. One vaccine candidate, known as Aidsvax and manufactured by the US biotechnological company Vaxgen, is already undergoing phase three trials.

“The Vaxgen vaccine relies on stimulating antibodies which latch on to surface proteins on the Aids virus,” said Prof Andrew McMichael, of Oxford University. “The trouble is the surface of the virus mutates at such a high rate. Most people, myself included, are skeptical about whether this vaccine will work.”

Instead Prof McMicheal’s team, widely considered to be the most likely to create an effective vaccine, have inserted DNA fragments from HIV into a cowpox virus in the hope that the resulting formula will stimulate T cells, the body’s most effective defenders.

Trials in London and Nairobi have already begun, although phase three trials — which will compare the effectiveness of the vaccine to a placebo in protecting “at-risk” individuals in East Africa — will not be launched for several years.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.