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Posted: Wednesday, 26 August 2009 9:51AM
Stroger meets with irate AIDS activists over vaccine
Bob Roberts Reporting
WBBM Newsradio 780
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CHICAGO (WBBM) - Cook County Board President Todd Stroger met Tuesday with a group of irate AIDS activists, who said he jumped the gun by trying to arrange the clinical testing of a vaccine to treat the deadly disease.
Stroger assured the activists he meant well.
"I thought this was something that would help people," he said. "It's not about me. It's about other people."
The GeoVax vaccine in question is reported to be testing well in preventive tests in 13 locations, in which the participants are uninfected. The activists said this test would be different, in that it would be used in therapeutic testing, which is being done nowhere else, and would require 10 HIV-positive patients to go off their current medications.
Papers signed by Stroger, by the Cook County Health and Hospital System, and by the CORE Foundation that administers county health services June 15 did not commit the county to the therapeutic test, but only gave the county's Ruth M. Rothstein CORE Center the ability to determine if it wanted to participate. On June 24, the CORE Foundation board, headed by County Commissioner John Daley, wrote GeoVax that CORE administrators elected not to go forward.
With a solitary exception, those who spoke at the 90-minute meeting backed CORE Center's decision not to go forward.
While others talked in abstract about their misgivings, one man was blunt.
"When I'm taken off my medications, I become ill," he said. "I have diarrhea. I have fever. I have fainting spells and my body shuts down. In other words, I could die."
Several physicians affiliated with CORE Center backed their bosses' decision, saying that the test would give some patients false hope and was not well-designed.
"This is a safety trial to see if it is safe...for 10 patients. That is what we got -- a single-site, 10-patient study," said CORE Center's Dr. Toin Adeyeni. "We didn't think that the risk of taking patients off their medications outweighed the benefit of anything, which there probably wouldn't have been."
Dr. Adeyeni suggested that GeoVax instead recruit patients at one of the 13 sites in which preventive testing is being done.
Not everyone who attended was in agreement.
"There will be a therapeutic trial," one man said. "Do you want to be the one to say you did not allow that chance to happen? It's doesn't make sense to me the risk of not finding out if this vaccine could work."
Others complained that the man did not realize the dangers that could result from the testing to participants.
Stroger communications director Eugene Mullins acknowledged speaking for two hours with CORE Center personnel about the decision not to go forward with the trial, but Stroger said Mullins did not communicate the conversation to him.
Even Stroger himself admitted he could have benefitted from a more in-depth briefing before taking a stand.
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