We’re writing to respond to a recent letter to the editor criticising vaccine research and to The Star’s subsequent request for opinions about the validity of HIV vaccine research in South Africa.

The search for an HIV vaccine has been long and hard, and we’ve had many setbacks along the way. But two years ago we saw the first glimmer of hope when an HIV vaccine in Thailand was found to be partially effective.

As Kerry Cullinan reported in The Star last week, researchers around the world have been trying to determine why the vaccine worked, and they have found some clues that will help guide the next steps in developing and testing HIV vaccines.

This research is still very preliminary and it doesn’t mean an HIV vaccine is around the corner.

But we’re very excited about where we are in HIV vaccine research now and very proud of the contribution South Africa is making.

Everyone who works on HIV vaccine research – researchers, laboratory technicians, community educators, trial recruiters – plays a vital role in helping to end this epidemic here in South Africa and around the world.

In addition, thousands of South Africans have already volunteered for HIV vaccine trials, and thousands more will be needed.

These men and women are true heroes in the fight against Aids and we all owe them a debt of gratitude. We don’t know if any of the vaccine trials in South Africa – including the planned trial following up on the partial success of the Thai vaccine trial – will provide a breakthrough that will lead to direct access to a safe and effective vaccine against HIV.

But we do know that all of these trials and dozens more trials around the world provide critical information that keeps the research process moving forward and moves us ever closer to a safe and effective vaccine.

South Africa needs sustainable biomedical interventions for HIV and vaccines are the key to ending epidemics.

We’ve made tremendous strides here in responding to the HIV epidemic, but this country still has the highest numbers of HIV infections in the world and last year almost 300 000 South Africans died of Aids. South Africa needs an Aids vaccine.

And while the search for a vaccine is a long and hard process, we’re not willing to give up. Developing vaccines has always been difficult. It took decades to develop vaccines for smallpox, polio, yellow fever and most of the other diseases for which we now have vaccines.

The dividend from a successful vaccine is huge. Smallpox was eliminated with a vaccine; polio is gone from South Africa and most other countries around the world, thanks to a vaccine.

We want to see the samething happen to HIV, but we won’t see that unless we continue the hard work of developing and testing new HIV vaccines and feeding the information we get from each clinical trial and each set of experiments back into our knowledge base and trying again. It’s what researchers call an iterative process.

So while some may see a clinical trial that does not yield a licensable product as a failure, we know that such a trial may provide critical information that moves us a step or two closer to the licensable product.

South Africans should be proud of this country’s leadership in developing new options to prevent HIV. We hope that pride extends to continuing to support HIV vaccine trials.

Glenda Grey

Executive director, Perinatal HIV Research Unit

Wits University

Mitchell Warren

Executive director, AVAC: Global Advocacy for HIV Prevention Research