I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Scientists from the U.S. Army, U.S. Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease, Thai officials and two private companies released startling results of a 16,000 person HIV vaccine trial. A vaccine combination of two failed vaccines created immunity to HIV in just over 30 percent of those vaccinated.
While 30 percent is no where near the commercially viable 70 to 80 percent effectiveness expected for a new vaccine to get approval for widespread use, it is the first time a vaccine has shown any effectiveness against the virus that causes AIDS, reports the New York Times.
The combination vaccine, Alvac-HIV and Aidsvax, had been previously tested in human trials, but had shown to be ineffective. Researchers, understanding that each vaccine worked on a different part of the immune response to infection, theorized they the two vaccines together would prove effective.
Of note, the vaccine did not trigger an antibody response, the Times reports. This was proven by those who received the combination vaccine, but still got infected. Their viral load was comparable to those persons who received the placebo vaccine. A viral load measures the amount of viral particles in the blood, and is used a marker for disease progression in HIV. According to the Times story, the fact that there was not a lower viral load shows that those who were vaccinated did not develop antibodies which would block the virus from reproducing.
While this is certainly an important discovery, HIV investigators warn this is just a first step.
“I don’t want to use a word like ‘breakthrough,’ but I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is a very important result,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of the trial’s backers.
“For more than 20 years now, vaccine trials have essentially been failures,” he went on. “Now it’s like we were groping down an unlit path, and a door has been opened. We can start asking some very important questions.”
Two human trials of Merck vaccine were halted in 2007 because the vaccine not only failed to create immunity from the virus, it actually increased the likelihood of infection.
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