Gel provides hope in long quest to find barrier to HIV infection

The breakthrough in the long quest to help women whose partners will

not use condoms came from a study from South Africa.

However, the results need to be confirmed by further research.

Also, the researchers fear the protection level is probably not enough to win approval for microbicide gel in countries such as the US – but they are optimistic it can be improved.

"We are giving hope to women" who account for most new HIV infections, said Michel Sidibe, executive director of the World Health Organisation's Aids programme.

A gel could "help us break the trajectory of the Aids epidemic", he said.

Dr Anthony Fauci of the US National Institutes of Health said: "It's the first time we've ever seen any microbicide give a positive result" that scientists agree is true evidence of protection.

The vaginal gel, spiked with the Aids drug tenofovir, cut the risk of HIV infection by 50 per cent after one year of use and 39 per cent after two and a half years, compared with a gel that contained no medicine.

To be licensed in the US, a gel or cream to prevent HIV infection may need to be at least 80 per cent effective, Dr Fauci said. That might be achieved by adding more tenofovir or getting women to use it more consistently.

In the study, women used the gel only 60 per cent of the time; those who used it more often were better protected.

The gel also cut in half the chances of getting HSV-2, the virus that causes genital herpes, important because other sexually-transmitted diseases increase the risk of getting HIV.

Even partial protection is a huge victory that could be a boon not just in poor countries but for couples anywhere when one partner has HIV and the other does not, said Dr Salim Abdool Karim, the South African researcher who led the study and presented the results at a conference in Vienna yesterday.