India, home to the world’s second largest HIV population after South Africa, is set to begin human trials of a new vaccine against the virus in January, a research institute said Tuesday. The country has over 5.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS and experts saying the number could quadruple by 2010. Human trials of vaccines against different strains of the virus are already being conducted in the United States, Europe, Africa and South America. The Indian trial will focus on sub-type C of the virus, the most common in the country. “It will be the first test in India of a HIV vaccine on humans,” said Ramesh Paranjape, a deputy director of the National AIDS Research Institute (NARI) based in Pune, around 100 miles south of Bombay. In August the World Bank warned the disease would become the single largest cause of death in the world’s second most populous country unless there was a change in treatment policy and progress on prevention.
