Gel 'a tool to empower women'
2010-07-20 13:32
Vienna - A senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official on Tuesday welcomed a new study showing the effectiveness of an anti-HIV vaginal gel and said that this would soon become a tool to empower women.
But the gel would only ever be fully effective in combination with other prevention tools such as condoms, said Gottfried Hirnschall, the WHO's HIV/Aids director who was in Vienna to attend a large conference on the virus and immune disease.
A clinical trial among nearly 900 women in South Africa showed that overall, using the so-called tenofovir gel lowers the risk of infection by 39%.
Women who used the gel 80% of the times they had sex lowered the infection risk by 54%.
"This new technology has the potential to alter the course of the HIV epidemic, especially in southern Africa where young women bear the brunt of this devastating disease," study co-author Quarraisha Abdool Karim said.
Karim is a senior scientist at the CAPRISA research institution in South Africa after which the widely anticipated trial was named.
Take control
"It's the first time we have something that gives women the possibility to take control," Hirnschall said. "But it's not something where we can say that it is the new prevention weapon."
No HIV prevention medicine or mechanism would ever be 100% effective, he said. Therefore the gel should be combined with condoms and male circumcisions.
The tenofovir gel contains an antiretroviral drug that has been used to treat people who are already infected in fighting the virus.
It has to be applied up to 12 hours before and shortly after having sex to be most effective.
The International Partnership for Microbicides, one of the two non-profit groups that hold a license for producing tenofovir, estimates that the cost for one dose of the gel would be below 1 dollar.
The product could come on the market in two or three years once further field trials have been conducted, WHO expert Hirnschall said.
The South African trial also showed that the gel lowers genital herpes infections by 51%.
- SAPA
