Gatonye Gathura And Jevans Nyabiage
4 September 2008
Nairobi — Sex workers in Nairobi and Mombasa may still hold the key to an HIV vaccine, according to recent studies.
In Mombasa, researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, US, have identified a woman with HIV that was easily made inactive by antibodies.
Published in the journal PLoS Medicine (January issue) the study says this could provide important clues for designing an HIV vaccine, badly needed to cut the number of new infections, now at about 2.5 million per year worldwide.
The second is a 20-year study of a group of sex workers in Pumwani, Nairobi, by the universities of Nairobi and Manitoba and published in the Journal Proteome Research.
Adam Burgener and colleagues note that 140 of more than 2,000 sex workers studied appear resistant to HIV infection. Over the years, the scientists realised that although some women presumably were exposed to HIV through their sex work (which could include 5-10 encounters every day), they were never infected.
"Surprisingly, the longer a woman was continuously involved in sex work, the less likely she was to be infected with HIV."
The scientists say they carried out advanced tests and identified several proteins that were differentially expressed in cervical fluid samples from HIV-resistant women compared with controls.
At the Coast, Julie Overbaugh and colleagues noticed that a woman carried a virus easily inactivated by antibodies.
They found that it contains substances which inactivated the virus.
Although most people infected with HIV produce antibodies within weeks of infection, these antibodies rarely prevent the infection from progressing to Aids, unlike in the Mombasa woman.
Many years later
The two studies remind Kenyans of the famous Majengo prostitutes in the late 1990s who were found to have some resistance to HIV and around whom the first vaccine in the country was based. However many years later, the vaccine developed by the Oxford, Nairobi and two North American universities was said to have failed to provide protection.
The failed vaccine was characterised by ownership differences with Kenya considered a junior partner while the latest studies hardly make any mention of the Kenyan researchers.
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