By CAMERON FULLER
The International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care’s (IAPAC) recent announcement that they have 50 volunteers to be injected with a live, weakened strain of the HIV virus has elicited concern from local medical professionals and AIDS activists.
IAPAC’s goal is to raise the survival rate and quality of life of all people affected by HIV and other life threatening illnesses. It provides education about the illnesses and seeks to provide actual medical solutions to the diseases.
Through letters, as well as IAPAC’s internet site, the study’s leader and medical director of the AIDS Health Care Foundation in Los Angeles, Charles Farthing, has appealed to physicians to be volunteers.
“Physicians need to respond to the moral imperative of doing everything possible to bring low-cost, effective HIV vaccines to market. There are millions of lives at stake. It is time to follow in the tradition of Louis Pasteur, Walter Reed, and hundreds of our other colleagues who made the commitment to be the first human subjects in critical clinical trials,” Farthing said.
IAPAC hopes to receive the blessing of the FDA, but plans to conduct the study even if the FDA does not give official approval.
Dr. Kristen Ries, a doctor at the University of Utah Health Center, received an invitation to participate in the study by being injected and is a member of the association. Although live injections would not begin for at least two years, Ries approaches the idea of the study with a degree of uncertainty.
“I don’t think we know enough … I’m kind of skeptical,” Ries said. “I think the vaccines still need to come a long way.”
Ries also suggested that further testing on animals would be a safer path to take.
However, IAPAC’s study is welcomed with open arms by the Executive Director of the Utah Aids Foundation, Barbara Shaw.
“We totally support any efforts at a vaccine or at a cure or a better treatment. This is good medical research so we certainly support it,” Shaw said.
Shaw believes that the ethical questions raised by this study are similar to ethical questions raised in any study. Physicians must choose how to properly deal with control groups. According to Shaw, without the courage to face these difficult decisions, there would still be few treatments against seriously crippling diseases.
“Anything that will give people a better quality of life we are thrilled about,” Shaw said. “What frightens us is that many people will think that as medication improves, it means it is a cure. This is not a cure. This is far from a cure.”
Up to this point, the volunteers for the group’s study include doctors, nurses, and health policy activists from around the world. The volunteers are counting on a vaccine studied by Dr. Ronald Derosiers, a Harvard Medical School researcher. The vaccine has shown some signs of protecting monkeys from the primate equivalent of HIV.
Although some people may be shocked with the use of healthy volunteers, Shaw explained healthy volunteers are a necessary control group to make sure it is a scientific study.
With a control group, doctors would be able to measure the health of the patients before being injected as well as after receiving the virus. Doctors could also be sure each volunteer would only be receiving the virus through the levels dictated by the vaccine.
