Word: trial
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...Following the lead of Switzerland and a handful of other countries, Britain recently concluded a four-year trial in which longtime addicts were given daily heroin injections as part of a treatment program to eventually wean them off the drug. Now, with results showing the trial succeeded in reducing street-drug use and crime among participants, Britain could soon become only the second country in Europe to institutionalize the program. That would mean permanent, state-funded heroin clinics would be set up across the country to treat the most heavily addicted people. (See pictures of the dark path of drugs...
...trial, which was conducted in the cities of London, Darlington and Brighton, researchers divided the 127 participants into three groups, giving one group heroin and giving the other two intravenous methadone and oral methadone. Although all three groups showed improved physical and mental health thanks to the counseling and social services offered by the clinics, the heroin-using group fared much better than the others. After half a year, three-quarters had largely stopped taking street heroin. And the number of crimes committed by those in the group dropped from 1,700 in the 30 days before the program began...
...know whether our current measures of the human immune response are even relevant to the protection that we see in this trial. [That is] a humbling reminder of how little we know, and how much work remains to be done in our search for an optimal HIV vaccine," Fauci says...
Both Kim and Fauci emphasize that it will probably be a "significant period of time" before the trial results lead to a vaccine that can be submitted for approval for use in the general public, if such a breakthrough occurs at all. Most licensed vaccines have an efficacy rate of at least 70%, although it's possible that an HIV vaccine with lower efficacy may gain approval, Kim says. "The efficacy threshold may be a consideration that is specific to individual countries, the nature of their HIV-AIDS epidemics and the performance characteristics of the vaccine," Kim says...
...comparison, studies in Africa suggest that male circumcision can cut the risk of HIV infection in men by up to 60%. Still, in a field that has been beset by a series of high-profile failures in the past 20 years - in 2007, for example, two international trials of a promising Merck vaccine in about 4,000 people were stopped early, and later analysis suggested that the vaccine may have increased people's risk of infection - the results of the Thai trial are a turning point. "In terms of where the vaccine world was even a few weeks ago, this...