Serious fail
A gel to prevent the transmission of HIV? Maybe later, but certainly not now:
The gel, PRO 2000, is intended for use before sexual intercourse to help reduce HIV infection.
It was tested in a trial involving 9,385 women in four African countries. The risk of HIV infection was not significantly different among women supplied with the gel than in women given a placebo gel.
Now I realize that a control group is necessary for clinical trials, but something about this particular test disturbs me, and I’m pretty sure it’s this:
In order to gauge the effectiveness of the trial microbicide some of the “participants” were given a substance with no medicinal properties whatsoever — a placebo — with the instruction to begin or resume sexual relations in a population with a notoriously high incidence of HIV infection.
To put it bluntly, the “lab rats” in this experiment were human beings with human hopes, loves, fears, responsibilities. Keep in mind that the participants necessarily had to be uninfected women at the outset of the trial. It is undeniable that the researchers wanted the women to be inseminated by men infected with a lethal disease agent. The trial would be pointless otherwise.
Still, this really doesn’t sound like the second coming of Dr Mengele:
Women were asked to use the gel before each sex act and were also given condoms and counselled to use them together with gel. Women were followed up for 12 months (or up to 24 months in Uganda) and were evaluated regularly. All were provided with safe sex counselling, treatment for sexually transmitted infections and referral for other non trial-related medical conditions.
But had “safe sex” practices actually been used, the researchers would presumably have had less useful data.
In the meantime, 253 women of those 9,385 have contracted HIV. It’s hard not to be disturbed by this, good intentions notwithstanding.
