The Hope of 314
I usually follow African affairs until I can't bear the doom and gloom. This morning, for example, I watched (yes, on CSPAN BookTV) Lynne Duke talk about her book 'Mandela, Mobuto and Me: A Newswoman's African Journey' and after the main presentation acquired a big knot in my stomach that I couldn't shake until I saw the day's headline.
What is this continent I come from? Why are we so troubled and forgotten?
But the headline of the day bore an unimaginable hope in gigantic bold slab-serif font:
Vaccine for AIDS appears to work
If ever there was a moment to feel some hope, this was that moment.
With that warmth in my veins and an increased vigour I proceeded to breakfast with Hitchens (The Perils of Partition - comments later) but at work when I was able to start researching the validity of this headline I was once again disappointed by the breaking news on the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) website:
VaxGen Inc. announced today that its investigational AIDS vaccine, AIDSVAX, although safe, did not prove effective in human trials in North America and Europe. AIDSVAX was designed to prevent people who are uninfected with HIV from contracting the virus or developing AIDS.
But apparently there is a disparity in effectiveness based on ethnicity that must be taken into account. From CNN:
In blacks, the researchers said the vaccine was 78.3 percent effective, but of all the people in the trial there were only 314 blacks. Blacks account for half of all new HIV infections in the United States, according to government figures.
So my hope therefore, and the hope of the Africans turning on CNN this morning (or yesterday evening), rests on this precious number 314. It's a battle inevitably to be won but what cost have we paid -
8:04:21 AM 
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