Why There Is No Vaccine For HIV/AIDS
Because there is no vaccine for HIV, the only way people can prevent infection with the virus is to avoid behaviors putting them at risk of infection, such as sharing needles and having unprotected sex.
Many people infected with AIDS HIV have no symptoms. It is therefore difficult to know with certainity whether a sexual partner is infected with HIV unless they have taken a HIV test and not engaged in risky behavior since.
Abstaining from having sex or using male latex condoms or female polyurethane condoms may offer partial protection, during oral, anal, or vaginal sex. Only water-based lubricants should be used with male latex condoms.
Although some laboratory evidence shows that spermicides can kill HIV, researchers have not found that these products can prevent a person from getting HIV.
NIAID recently supported two studies that concluded adult male circumcision reduces a man’s risk of contracting HIV by about 1/2. The studies, which were done in Uganda and Kenya, pertain only in the cases of heterosexual transmission. As with most prevention strategies, adult male medical circumcision is not completely effective at preventing HIV transmission. Circumcision will be more effective if it is a part of a more complete prevention strategy that includes condoms.
Vaccines help the immune system to recognize a pathogen so that it can fight it off if it shows up. Despite extraordinary advances in understanding both HIV and the human immune system, a fully successful HIV vaccine continues to elude researchers. This why we primarily reley on HIV medications like Kaletra, and combivir.
HIV attacks CD4+ T cells, the most important part of the immune system that coordinates and directs the activities of other types of immune cells that combat intruding microbes. In order for a vaccine to be effective it would need to be able to activate these cells- a hard feat if they are being infected and destroyed by the HIV virus.Scientist have not figured out the correlates of immunity or protection for HIV and are working to make vaccines to induce the necessary immune resonse necessary.
Unlike other viral diseases for which investigators have made successful vaccines, there are no documented cases of complete recovery from HIV infection. So, HIV vaccine research has no actual human model of recovery from an infection and subsequent protection from re-infection to help it. HIV will continually mutate in an infected person while it recombinds to evolve into brand new strains. This extensive diversity of HIV poses a challenge to vaccine design as an HIV vaccine would need to protect against many different strains of the virus circulating throughout the world. Vaccines in the past have only had to fight off a small number of strains, even one.