MEXICO CITY – Ten years after the RV144 "Thai trial" was the first to show that an effective HIV vaccine was possible, three efficacy trials for HIV vaccines are once again underway.

A research team at the University of New Mexico (UNM), Albuquerque, is moving forward with the development of a vaccine against tauopathies, a neurodegenerative class of diseases that includes Alzheimer's disease, but while promising in the lab, it could take a decade to get an actual vaccine to market.

By now I’ve learned to keep my flu shot habit a secret. Every year about this time, since I was 18 years old, I get vaccinated. But long ago I stopped telling people about it, so I don’t have to hear: “Oh, you know the flu vaccines are made of antifreeze [mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde], right?” or “That’s a crazy thing to do, because the shot itself can make you sick!” or – this one’s fairly new – “You don’t really need it if you’ve got a healthy immune system. Anyway flu shots cause Alzheimer’s [in the old] and autism [in...

Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, and when I reflect on AIDS, I generally do it with a sense of amazement about how far we have come in the treatment of HIV since AIDS first came to the attention of the U.S. medical establishment, in form of a cluster of pneumocystis pneumonia infections in young men, in 1981. An AIDS-free generation is no longer a pipe dream. With all the progress that’s being made, though, I’ve been struck how one thing that seems to keep receding into the distance – like a manifestation of the joke that the future is...

Viruses are on the border between living and dead. So are the theories about what some of them cause. Two studies were published last week that showed no link between xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and either chronic fatigue syndrome or prostate cancer. The scientific journals consider the matter settled with these studies. In theirs new sections, Nature and PLoS ONE wrote about “the nail in XMRV’s coffin” and “The Final Chapter on XMRV and Prostate Cancer.” Umm . . . good luck with that. Actually, the link between XMRV and prostate cancer may be laid to rest fairly...

With science boldly taking us where we’ve never gone before, we’re exploring new worlds and stretching the boundaries of our universe. While these are exciting times for the adventurer in us, they can be discomfiting for our inner ethicist. From cloning to stem cell research to genetic testing to patent eligibility to drug pricing to compassionate use to quality-of-life issues, we face a growing number of decisions fraught with moral and ethical questions that cannot be easily answered in a lab or by a textbook. What once were merely philosophical debates about the future promise of science have become gut-wrenching...

Editor’s note: Since Dr. Breindl first wrote about vaccines and autism in 2008, the paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism has been retracted by the journal that published it, and its author Andrew Wakefield has lost his medical license. But vaccine skepticism is alive and well – and so, during this World Immunization Week, the question remains as pressing as ever: How do you have a productive discussion on policy with people who disagree with you on the facts? I am not a vaccine skeptic. My children have all their required vaccines and some optional ones as well. We...