NIGERIA ALSO JOINS IN THE SEARCH FOR THE CURE OF ..HIV AIDS ..hmmm

Nigeria has set a ten-year target to develop an effective vaccine to prevent, treat and cure the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS...

Nigeria has set a ten-year target to develop an effective vaccine to prevent, treat and cure the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The Director General of the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), Professor John Idoko who made the plan public at a newspaper forum said that the federal government's decision to go into such a vaccine venture was to boost the research for drugs to combat the HIV strains that are peculiar to Nigeria and the West Africa sub-region. He further disclosed that a National HIV Vaccine plan was being prepared and would be launched at the end of this month. According to him the plan incorporates a guide for national and international scientific communities on the collaborative research, which would be implemented to evaluate HIV vaccines in Nigeria in a coordinated manner. This sounds like good news. Although, the HIV prevalence in Nigeria is believed to be 3.6 percent of the population, considered by experts to be low compared with countries in the sub-region, this latest step is timely, particularly as current research worldwide has not reported any significant breakthrough in finding a reliable vaccine to tackle the HIV/AIDS pandemic. So can Nigeria pull this one off?