hiv vaccine FAQ

If your doctor has directed you to use this medication, your doctor or pharmacist may already be aware of any possible drug interactions and may be monitoring you for them. Do not start, stop, or change the dosage of any medicine before checking with your doctor, health care provider, or pharmacist first.

HIV vaccine is a therapeutic vaccine designed to stimulate an immune response against a variety of HIV antigens in patients with HIV. It consists of a suspension of killed HIV-1 virus particles.

Pending FDA approval for therapeutic vaccination to elicit immune responses against a wide variety of HIV antigens Administered every 3 months and used in conjunction with ART or HAART antiviral drugs

No information is available about the side effects of the HIV vaccine. This document does not contain all possible side effects and others may occur. Check with your physician for additional information about side effects.

There are many treatments for HIV , but it's still important to develop vaccines. HIV drugs have side effects, are expensive, and can be hard for people in some countries to get. You can also develop a problem called "drug resistance," which means you'll need to switch to new medications when the ones you're using stop working well for you. There are steps you can take to reduce your risk of HIV. These include: Lower the number of people you have sex with. Use a condom when you have sex. Take medicine every day called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), such as emtricitabine/tenofovir disoproxil fumarate ( Truvada ) or emtricitabine/tenofovir alafenamide ( Descovy ). Even so, thousands of people in the U.S. each year are diagnosed with HIV. An HIV vaccine could help prevent HIV infection and save lives.

Researchers have studied HIV vaccines for almost a quarter-century, but they have not yet found one that works. There are several reasons for this. In general, vaccines act in similar ways to a natural infection, which means your body makes antibodies to kill the virus. But HIV doesn't seem to activate this kind of response. There are no cases of a person who is HIV-positive who developed an immune response that successfully fought the infection. Researchers are still trying to figure out how to set off the right kind of immune response for HIV. Another stumbling block for scientists is that most vaccines use a weak or inactivated version of the germ to start your body's immune response. But that doesn't seem to work well for HIV, and a vaccine with a live virus is too risky to use.