Africa launches own AIDS vaccine initiative

SOMERSET WEST, South Africa, June 4 (Reuters) - Africa launched a campaign on Monday for a fairer share of funding into the development of an AIDS vaccine, saying it was unacceptable the world's poorest continent received so little attention.

Though more than 28 million Africans carry the virus that causes AIDS, less than two percent of world research funding goes towards fighting the unique strains of the disease in Africa.

"It is unacceptable that the continent that is home to more than two-thirds of all people living with HIV-AIDS receives so little attention," South African Medical Research Council chief Malegapuru Makgoba told reporters in Somerset West, near Cape Town, where scientists gathered to swap notes on the programme to develop AIDS vaccines.

He said research leading up to the formal launch of the African Aids Vaccine Programme (AAVP) had shown that only one dollar in every 60 spent worldwide on research into HIV-AIDS went into the search for an African vaccine.

"This is a very important initiative, but more than that, it is a very urgent initiative," Makgoba said.

The AAVP is being coordinated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva, but African scientists are leading the search for a vaccine specifically designed to slow the spread of the continent's worst health disaster in history.

WHO programme coordinator Coumba Toure said that only $41 million had so far been devoted to research on AIDS in Africa out of a total of $2.5 billion spent since 1987.

The African vaccine initiative requires $233 million over the seven years that AAVP participants have given themselves to test and produce a cheap, effective and safe vaccine for the HIV-AIDS strains common in Africa, she said.

Researchers at the conference said that with very limited access to medical care in much of Africa, most of those already infected will die before the first vaccine is ready for production in about eight years.

NEGLECT AND SLOW DECISION-MAKING

Ugandan research institute chief Pontiano Kaleebu said only two of 80 vaccine trials completed since research began in 1987 had been in Africa. Of programmes now under way, only one was taking place on the continent.

He said this was partly a consequence of neglect and partly of slow and complex decision-making in Africa, where approval for a trial could take two years and require the permission of everyone from the cabinet to local headmen.

"When companies spend money to develop a vaccine, they look for a market and that market is not usually in Africa. We need a lot of pressure to drive this process, political pressure," he said.

Toure said AIDS was now the leading cause of death in Africa, but most of the research on vaccines was being done for the United States and Europe.