Most US women face stroke risk

The most promising of the many experimental HIV vaccines in development will offer only limited immunity against the deadly virus,US government scientists said recently ahead of world HIV Vaccine Awareness Day.Unlike classical vaccines,the first-generation HIV vaccines will not enable people to fight off the virus,but may protect their immune system from the worst ravages of the virus and dealy the onset of AIDS.And because patients are at their most infectious when viral levels are high,such vaccines might also reduce the spread of the sexually transmitted disease,making it a useful tool for public health authorities batting to contain the global HIV/AIDS pandemic."There is optimism that even a less-than-perfect vaccine could benefit both individual recipients and the at-risk community," said the authors in a commentary published in the "New England Journal of Medicine."It is still not clear when the first vaccines will be available .

A researcher from the University of Newcastle has been working on a new treatment that only affects cancer cells and not the normal body cells. Kathryn Skelding's work may be an improvement on conventional chemotherapy and radiation treatment, which leave their impact on normal body cells too. "In theory, the viurs is able to selectively target and destroy many different types of cancer cells, including breast cancers, whilst leaving normal cells unaffected,"she said. Debilitating symptoms associated with conventional treatments-nuasea,vomiting and hair loss-could also be avoided by using the Coxsackie virus. "If this research is successful we could have something that produces side effects as harmless as a mild, common cold-like infection yet it could successfully treat breast cancer,"she said.