LAUNCHING A PHASE II HIV VACCINE TRIAL IN HAITI and a NEW FACILITY TO PREVENT HIV TRANSMISSION FROM MOTHER TO CHILD.

Haiti Study Group on Opportunistic Infections and Kaposi’s Sarcoma (GHESKIO) center is a non-governmental organization (NGO) working for about 20 years in close collaboration with the Haitian Ministry of Health and Population (MSPP), local private and public institutions, French and US universities in particular Cornell and Vanderbilt. The three main GHESKIO’s objectives are services, training and operational research in diarrheal diseases, HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections (STD) and tuberculosis. GHESKIO is Haiti’s main HIV voluntary counseling and testing center with over 10,000 persons tested in 2000. Within the last three years GHESKIO provided training in AIDS control to over 2000 health workers, community and religious leaders from all over the country. The center has been one of leading Caribbean research institutions.

On March 27, 2001 the international phase II HIV vaccine trial involving two other countries, Brazil and Trinidad/Tobago will be launched first in Haiti at the GHESKIO site.  The two other sites are expected to initiate immunization in the next few weeks.

The Phase II HIV vaccine trial funded by US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) will use two vaccines, one produced by Aventis Pasteur (France) and the other by VaxGen (USA). Both vaccines have been tested extensively in the US, France Thailand and elsewhere and found to be safe. A total of 120 volunteers at low risk of getting infected with HIV, 40 per country, will be enrolled and followed for 18 months. Eligibility criteria are strict. Volunteers must be in good health, demonstrate strong willingness to participate as well as perfect understanding of all aspects of the trial. Numerous national and international ethics committees have approved the study protocol. The primary objective in this trial is to determine the immunogenicity of volunteers from different genetic make-up, nutritional status and infectious diseases burden. Another objective is to evaluate the capacity of these international sites to take part with the United States and other countries in an eventual phase III trial to determine the efficacy of the best candidate vaccine.

The HIV vaccine initiative has been introduced in Haiti in 1991. It has benefited from the strong support of the Haitian government through the 5 successive Heads of the Ministry of Health and Population, who are expected to attend the brief ceremony on March 27 celebrating the start of the trial.

GHESKIO will be launching as well the inauguration of a new physical facility at the same headquarters aimed at providing care, counseling, family planning and antiretroviral therapy to HIV-infected women to prevent transmission of the virus to their eventual offspring. Funds for the new facility were provided by UNFPA. The Haitian Ministry of Health and Population is launching a major national program to prevent HIV mother to infant transmission with GHESKIO as the training site. In 2000 about 100 HIV-infected pregnant women were cared for at GHESKIO to prevent HIV vertical transmission.   

Haiti’s Ministry of Health and Population’s strong partnership with the private sector in the fight against AIDS and other STD has kept the national HIV seroprevalence at 4.5 % in the last survey conducted in 2000.