Wednesday, 18 January 2012

A Herpes Vaccine? Not Yet

If you found Monday's blog about the failures of herpes treatments too depressing, this one isn't going cheer you up all that much. An article published in the January 5 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine found that a herpes vaccine that is currently under development didn't work at all against HSV-2 and only protected a small proportion of women against genital infections by HSV-1. Interestingly, and counter to common-wisdom, the scientists also found that more genital herpes infections in their control population were caused by HSV-1 than HSV-2. Even more depressing? The study found that viral shedding occurred more frequently in the vaccinated group than in the controls. That's a pretty significant failure.

This was the same herpes vaccine that had previously shown some efficacy in serodiscordant couples, and so this outcome, in a less specialized pool of 18-30 year old women, is actually a step backwards in its development. As I keep telling all the people who wonder why there isn't a cure or a vaccine for herpes yet, it isn't that scientists aren't trying. It's that they haven't yet found anything that works.



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Source: http://std.about.com/b/2012/01/18/a-herpes-vaccine-not-yet.htm

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