[Pharm-policy] Nairobi: Our Bodies, Our Vaccine

[James Love]

http://allafrica.com/stories/200010190217.html


Our Bodies, Our Vaccine

The East African (Nairobi)
October 19, 2000 

Nairobi 

Last week, a report appearing in our sister paper, The Daily Nation,
revealed that divisions have surfaced in the Kenyan and British team of
researchers that has developed a promising test vaccine for Aids.

The problem is a move by the British side to patent critical components
of the test vaccine in Britain without the involvement or knowledge of
the Kenyans, who have been part of the vaccine's development from the
very beginning.

The team developed the test vaccine following the observation that some
commercial sex workers in Nairobi's sprawling slum of Majengo were
apparently immune to HIV, despite repeated exposure to the virus. The
researchers subsequently jointly designed a test vaccine based on the
prostitutes' cellular response to HIV.

Given their past and ongoing collaboration, it is understandable that
the Kenyan researchers involved in the project are deeply concerned that
their names have been excluded from the patent application papers filed
by their colleagues with the British property rights' office.

The unilateral application means that, were a successful vaccine to
emerge from the programme, Kenyan researchers would have no rights to
any royalties accruing from the production and use of the vaccine.

Over the past few years, concern has been growing that with more
stringent controls in developed countries and the higher risk of
crippling compensation litigation, unscrupulous scientists bent on
making scientific breakthroughs - and this is not in any way to cast
aspersions on the British Aids researchers - are increasingly taking
advantage of lax controls in the developing world to conduct unethical
studies there.

It is for this reason that two years ago, UNAids, the UN body that co-
ordinates global policy on HIV, formulated guidelines to regulate
research on the killer virus. They stipulate that any research conducted
in a given population should have the potential to benefit that
population, and that all subjects involved in the research should do so
of their own volition.

The subjects must also be fully educated on all aspects of the study,
including the risks. Using these guidelines, for example, the Aids
vaccine studies initiated in Uganda two years ago by American
researchers on a vaccine for a HIV strain not found in the country,
would not be considered ethical. The test vaccine developed by the
Kenyan-British team is, of course, totally different.

Meant to immunise against the strain most prevalent in the region, the
vaccine, if successful, will undoubtedly help combat Aids in East
Africa, the epicentre of the scourge in the world.

Still, the questions raised by the newspaper reports need to be
answered. Are the sex workers who inspired the development of the
vaccine counselled adequately about safe sex? Will the vaccine be
affordable to Kenyans? Who will hold the patent anyway? Who will be
authorised to manufacture it, given that Kenya currently does not have a
vaccine manufacturing capability?

To avoid inspiring popular distrust, Western scientists and their
African counterparts must develop explicit and inviolable guidelines for
sensitive projects which, like the Kenyan-British Aids vaccine
programme, have the potential of bettering the lives of some of the
world's most disadvantaged populations.