A bit of good news...

[marnanightingale]

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and Prime Minister Stephen Harper are expected to announce joint financing plans on Tuesday to test a possible vaccine for HIV.

And, you know, generally speaking if Stephen Lewis is feeling optimistic, so am I.

"Gates doesn't put a significant amount of money into vaccine research unless he's absolutely certain that it might yield something down the road," Stephen Lewis, the former UN secretary-general's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told CBC Newsworld on Monday.

Comments

[khriskin]

*crosses fingers and hopes*

[wijsgeer.livejournal.com]

I hope so to. But the devellopment of medicine is a hazourdous pursuit. I mean, in the sense that predicting outcomes is practically impossible. The fact that someone as Bill Gates picks out a specific project to sponsor doesn't make it inherently more likely to succeed, I think.
Only recently a trial with a vaginal gel was halted because instead of lowering the risk women ran of becoming infected, it increased it. Just to say it is all very hard to predict. (Not that I would not want Bill Gates and the team he sponsors, or any other team in the world, to succeed and find a prevention or cure for this horrible dissease.
article in the New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11081-experimental-antihiv-gel-increased-infection-rates.html)