March 4, 2003
Seen Any Good Headlines Lately?... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
The headline on the front of the newspaper and above the fold couldn't have been more direct: "AIDS vaccine mostly a failure." It bothered me instantly. And it's taken me a bit to dissect all the various elements I find irritating.
Let's get out of the way immediately that I'm not arguing for reporting only the positive. Obviously, some portion of an AIDS vaccine experiment appeared to be successful, and the headline conveyed that. Still, it left an impression of failure.
For people who get their news in snippets which trail across the bottom of their TV screen or come in 20-second sound bytes, I can only imagine what they're thinking. One turns to another, as in a Now Society cartoon, and says, "Oh, that AIDS vaccine. It doesn't work."
And now my blood pressure begins to rise. So, here's the real story.
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A biotech firm has just performed a three-year AIDS vaccine trial with 6,000 gay males, two-thirds of which were given the vaccine and one-third of which received a placebo. In fear that the volunteers might falsely believe they were protected from HIV, they received counseling every six months, and an independent study by the Center for Disease Control verified that their risky behavior actually declined during the study.
At the end of the three years, the White and Hispanic subjects contracted HIV at the same rate, whether they received the vaccine or not. But for Blacks, Asians and other minorities, the vaccinated group did significantly better, showing they were almost 70% less likely to contract HIV.
As this sub-group was comprised of only 500 individuals out of the 5,000, there was some concern that this was a quirk, but from a statistical standpoint, what a quirk it would be. And from a scientific standpoint, this is wildly exciting. You seldom get a clue which points like a big foam finger at a Super Bowl game and says, "Look over here!"
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I would also like to appreciate the fact that the all of these groups were included in the study. Not so long ago women were routinely excluded from clinical studies. Data on heart conditions were collected from men, and imaginative leaps were made to interpret these results for women. And who were the men? Generally, white middle-class men with health insurance and regular doctors.
There are times in science when you want to narrow down the field so that we can isolate what we're looking at. Why did the Black and Asian subjects appear to be protected, and not the White and Hispanic? If this study had been limited to white middle class gay males, we would have totally missed the interesting result. In fact, this AIDS vaccine may have been tossed altogether, when it can apparently serve a segment of our population.
In science, you narrow down subjects when the experiments tell you that you are on to something. And you must restrain yourself from extrapolating back up, without testing again.
But getting back to what started me off, science just plain can't be understood in a headline. And do have I a better one? Yes, I've got several. But they won't sell newspapers.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
