SARS-CoV-2 obtained immediate vaccine authorizations to combat it within a few months; However, the virus that causes AIDS has no immunization yet despite accumulating four decades of study and representing more than 600mil deaths every year around the world. There are two reasons that explain this “medical irony”: the biological challenge and social prejudice of disease, but before explaining them we need to understand how does the pathogen work and why is it so dangerous.
How HIV works in the body
Not like the others, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) attacks T cells, primarily responsible for identifying and eliminating invading pathogens from the body. When HIV manages to kill enough T cells, it becomes immunodeficiency syndrome. Acquired (AIDS), a condition characterized by the inability to immune system to eliminate diseases, according to WHO.
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Secondly, HIV is a retrovirus, which means that it fits into the infected person’s DNA. In other words, once this virus is contracted, it is impossible to distinguish between genetic material andaccordingly, delete it.
The biological challenge of disease
Vaccines work like a system formation immune to recognizing pathogens, so that when a virus arrives, the system attacks and deletes it. Although vaccines are artificially created, they are modeled after viruses that are naturally weakened by the body. That is, it takes a person who has recovered from the disease to emulate their own antibodies in the laboratory.
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The problem with HIV, as mentioned earlier, is that no one has recovered from it, so it is almost impossible to find it starting point for building a model of immunity.
The second challenge is that the virus mutates with quickly and can evade many people’s immune responses, making it and the body’s responses difficult to study, according to the researchers Alejandra Ortiz and Leonora Milán, in Mándarax.
Stigmata affect medicine
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In the end, HIV stigma and discrimination affects not only the emotional well-being and mental health of people living with it. Often these prejudices are transformed into public health and conservation policies of economic resources allocated to vaccine research and progress.
According to National Human Rights Commissionsince its discovery, the HIV epidemic He has been related to homosexual men because he was discovered among this population group. Historical discrimination against sexual diversity in health issues caused a lack of funding for workshops until 2015when the member states of the United Nations adopted the sustainable development goals (SDGs)with an extensive global program of ambitious targets in terms of health by 2030, which aims to end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases.
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And the preventive vaccine?
Phase 3 of the Mosaico clinical trial began in the first quarter of this year, a preventive vaccine (non-curative) of HIV in Mexico and eight other countries, the efficacy results of which are expected in four years.
It should be noted that the last time a The vaccine reached this testing stage in 2009, when the RV144 study showed some promising results.
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