Alongside a cure, an HIV vaccine would be the only way of completely halting the spread of HIV once and for all. At present, an effective preventive vaccine remains years from fruition, but there is a lot of exciting progress that indicates the world is getting closer.
Rwanda is not any behind in the research that would one day lead to the world free of AIDS, the pandemic that has shattered the world since the 1980s, according to Julienne Mukamwezi, a nurse and counselor at Projet San Francisco (PSF), the only research centre on HIV in Rwanda.
Located in Kigali’s Kicukiro District, PSF was established by the American researcher Dr. Susan Allen in 1986 for mainly conducting research on HIV and other sexually-transmitted diseases.
In collaboration with the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and Rwanda’s Ministry of Health with the funding of USAID, Ms. Mukamwezi told IGIHE on Tuesday that PSF has tested seven HIV vaccines on 274 people in Rwanda since 2005.She said the research progress is promising that time will come for an HIV vaccine.
“What we wish and hope is that we shall once day have an HIV/AIDS vaccine but we can’t ascertain now the exact time that will be achieved,” she said
A vaccine is a biological preparation that improves immunity to a particular disease, according to World Health Organisation (WHO).
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Mukamwezi clarified that vaccines, like any other medicine, are first well examined in laboratory, then tested with small animals like mice, rabbits and then with animals which have many similarities to people like monkeys.
“If these animals seriously suffer effects of the vaccine, that vaccine will not go beyond that stage of testing. If it causes no serious effects, the vaccine is then passed on for testing on human beings to see if the human body behaves like the animals’ against that vaccine,” she said.
She cleared illusions that one may catch HIV during the testing.
“Someone may think that testing an HIV vaccine on them can make them catch the virus, there is no way. There is no HIV virus in the vaccine. The purpose of the testing is to check if the vaccine increases the body’s immunity and it doesn’t cause serious problems to one’s body. We keep teaching our vaccine’s recipients that they have to guard against any acts expose them to HIV,” she said.
Since the PSF started HIV vaccine testing in 2005, the vaccines were proven to cause no harm to people. Most of the vaccines were able to increase the body’s immunity against the HIV but the research continues because the immunity was insufficient.
Mukamwezi encouraged Rwandans to keep guarding against the HIV, remembering that it is still there without any cure or vaccine. He cautioned the youth especially who carelessly behave in a way that exposes themselves to HIV, urging them to value life and avoid wrecking it into peril.
WHO figures indicated that there were 36.7 million people living with HIV/AIDS in 2016 while 1.8 million were acquiring it and one million people killed by AIDS annually.
The HIV prevalence stands at 3% in Rwanda and AIDS kills over 2,500 annually.
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