HIV Vaccine Moves Forward
Johnson & Johnson have announced plans to bring a HIV vaccine to large scale efficacy testing in humans, making it the first to ever reach this stage of testing.
The vaccine has been designed to treat all strains of HIV, has has already proven to be 100% effective at achieving immunity against the virus after a trial of 350 volunteers.
“Today we are thrilled to announce for the first time, that we are going into large scale efficacy testing of the HIV vaccine in humans,” announced Paul Stoffels, Chief Scientific Officer, Johnson & Johnson.
“As a scientist and a physician, I can tell you that this vaccine holds the promise of groundbreaking development.”
The Gates Foundation and the National Institute of Health will now help test the vaccine on a larger sample of humans.
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CDC says, There is No Chance of HIV Transmission if Positive Partner’s Viral Load is Undetectable
The statement, which came as part of a press release from the CDC on National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day:
Scientific advances have shown that antiretroviral therapy (ART) preserves the health of people living with HIV. We also have strong evidence of the prevention effectiveness of ART. When ART results in viral suppression, defined as less than 200 copies/ml or undetectable levels, it prevents sexual HIV transmission. Across three different studies, including thousands of couples and many thousand acts of sex without a condom or pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), no HIV transmissions to an HIV-negative partner were observed when the HIV-positive person was virally suppressed. This means that people who take ART daily as prescribed and achieve and maintain an undetectable viral load have effectively no risk of sexually transmitting the virus to an HIV-negative partner.