ONE of the world’s most influential and experienced HIV scientists, Dr Anthony Fauci, said yesterday that he thought HIV exposure would always be a risk to people — even in the face of a successful vaccine.

Speaking at the international AIDS Vaccine Conference 2008 in Cape Town, Fauci said that when the polio vaccine was developed people no longer had to worry about the risk of exposure, for example, at crowded swimming pools.

“I think we are always going to have to worry about exposure with HIV… and there will always be a place for other prevention measures that would complement an HIV vaccine,” said Fauci, director of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, when asked about the role of male circumcision to prevent infection.

The minister of health Barbara Hogan said yesterday that South Africa was committed to the search for a vaccine against HIV.

“There can’t be any other more important meeting at this time,” she said of the conference, attended by more than 900 scientists and being held for the first time in Africa.

He has worked on the development of other vaccines that keep people safe from infection, and been involved in HIV research since the virus was first identified in 1981.

“Can we guarantee an HIV vaccine in the classical sense?” he asked, after delivering the keynote address. “We cannot guarantee success. But we cannot give up trying.”

Fauci said: “I have been involved in both classical and HIV vaccinology for almost 25 years…we may have to settle for something that is not totally successful but has a major impact.”

He said newly-infected people provided important insight into understanding HIV and so did those people in whom the disease progresses slowly.

“We need to harness the innate immune system,” Fauci noted.

Fauci said that the search for an AIDS vaccine would yield valuable information in the long run on human immune systems, which could help to protect against not only HIV but also diseases like cancer.

In his speech Fauci stressed that HIV operated differently to other viruses for which vaccines had been developed. The body successfully cleared the infection for most viruses and people recovered, living on with immunity against a repeat infection, he said.