AIDS `galloping out of control' without vaccine

Before this day ends 15,000 more people worldwide will become infected with the AIDS virus, joining the 60 million who already have it or have died from it. The virus is "galloping out of control", according to the head of an international group working towards a vaccine for the disease.

Dr Seth Berkley, president and chief executive officer of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, yesterday met the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Liz O'Donnell, to brief her on progress towards a vaccine. The Government has provided £2.25 million to support the work of the IAVI, hence his visit.

The international organisation has so far attracted funding worth $230 million and has set a target of $550 million by 2007, according to Dr Berkley.

"Before the epidemic is over 100 million will have contracted the virus," Dr Berkley said yesterday after his meeting with Ms O'Donnell. There had been nothing like it since the Black Death swept Europe in the 14th century, he said.

It was having a powerful impact internationally, but particularly in the developing world. Overall life expectancy had reached between 60 and 70 years in Botswana due to improvements in healthcare. These gains had been wiped out by HIV, which has single-handedly reduced life expectancy there to just 48. "AIDS has become the No 1 world killer."

At the start of the epidemic South Africa's HIV positive pool was 0.6 per cent of the population. It now stood at 23 per cent, Dr Berkley said. "The epidemic is galloping out of control."

The IAVI group was established in 1996 as a not-for-profit company with funds to invest, its goal the development of a vaccine against HIV. Dr Berkley, who founded the organisation, likens it to a venture capital company. It is backing companies and a number of current vaccine trials in Europe, the US and Africa.

"IAVI has come in and tried to prime the pump," he said. He described the backing as a form of "social venture capital" that does not attempt to retain profits from the business or a hold on the intellectual property. Rather it signs contracts with the research companies which must guarantee that when a vaccine arises it will be made available at near-cost in third countries.

"That is the deal. The deal is to get it out at a reduced cost." The world had no working HIV vaccine, not because of a lack of technology but a lack of will and finance. "There are no advocates for vaccines, and there are huge advocates for treatments," Dr Berkley said.

Today more than $3,000 million is spent annually on drug therapy development, but just $100 million worldwide on vaccine studies. The IAVI came into existence "because neither the private nor the public sectors were involved in vaccine development".

Drug therapies offered no long-term solution to the problem, he said. Up to one-third of patients did not tolerate the drug regime and, worse still, up to 14 per cent of cases were developing resistance to drug treatments that have worked in the past. The disease would continue its inexorable rise unless a vaccine could be found.