Vaginal Gel Cuts Women's HIV Risk
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For First Time, Vaginal Gel Shown to Protect Against HIV From Sex
By
Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News
Reviewed By
Louise Chang, MD
Feb. 10, 2009 -- For the first time, a woman-controlled product -- the PRO
2000 vaginal gel -- has been shown to protect women from getting HIV during
sex.
Protection is far from complete: The gel cuts HIV risk by 30% -- or by 36%,
if women who went off the gel during a pregnancy are excluded.
But it's the first real success after a frustrating string of failures with
other products that promised to give women the means to protect themselves
against getting HIV from a male sex partner.
"The study, while not conclusive, provides a glimmer of hope to millions
of women at risk for HIV, especially young women in Africa," study leader
Salim S. Abdool Karim, PhD, MBChB, director of South Africa's AIDS research
center, says in a news release.
Karim and colleagues enrolled more than 3,000 sexually active women
from the U.S., Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Some of the women
used the PRO 2000 product, which blocks the cellular doorway HIV uses to enter
cells.
Other women used the BufferGel product, which was not effective. The two
active gels were compared to no gel or to a placebo gel.
Importantly, there were no significant safety issues with the gel. There
were 36 HIV infections among women using PRO 2000 -- fewer than the 54 HIV
infections among BufferGel users, the 51 HIV infections among placebo users,
and 53 HIV infections among women using no gel.
Women in the study were encouraged to have their partners wear condoms
during sex and were provided condoms for this purpose.
Although condom use was high, women who used the gel reported less condom
use by their partners. That's troubling. It's a signal that overconfidence in
protective gels might reduce use of a much more reliable means of preventing
HIV transmission.
The NIH-sponsored trial did not prove PRO 2000 effective. That will be up to
a larger, U.K.-sponsored trial involving nearly 9,400 women in Africa. That
study should be finished by the end of the summer.
Karim reported the findings at this week's annual Conference on Retroviruses
and Opportunistic Infections in Montreal.
SOURCES: News releases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. Medscape: "CROI 2009: Microbicide May Be First to Protect Against HIV Infection."
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