Last Tuesday I met with Michael Ninberg at the Hepatitis Education Project in the Maritime Building on Western between Madison and Marion. We talked for about two hours about hepatitis and public health and I think he will be a good resource in the future. I want to get all three websites up before the new year; two are done already but my blood-borne illness one still needs work. To break the work and give me new ideas I have been seeking paper info to send to Nandan. Mr. Ninberg gave me a lot, then he suggested I meet Kyle at the Needle Exchange on Second and Pike.
Kyle knew a lot about public health and he was also the only Spanish-speaking person at the Exchange. He gave me a lot of information and introduced me to James, who took me on a tour of the facility. I met Heather the nurse practitioner and Shantel who is her medical assistant for abscess treatment.
Yesterday I went to a meeting with the HIV CAB at Fred Hutch. I know a little about everyone there now and everyone has a lot to say to me. I told Eric, who works at Lifelong AIDS Alliance that I wanted to visit his organization. He told me to ask for a girl named Asia for general info or a guy named Tom for information about their affiliation with the HIV vaccine. Eric told me that they have three buildings and that they employ about 100 people. I asked him about their clinic and he told me they did not have one – the UW rents some space to do blood draws for social surveying related to meth use but he did not know anything about that. I have no idea how they could have a needle exchange and be an AIDS center without having some clinical facilities but perhaps we just misunderstood each other.
Tomorrow, Monday, I am going to the GLBT center down the road from the AIDS Alliance to attend a meeting about the recently cancelled STEP study. The story is that with the last vaccine, among those in the experimental group and the control group, more people in the control group got HIV than those in the experimental group, so the DSMB stopped the trial. There were about 1500 people in each group, and the numbers were something like 25 infected in one group and 40 in the other. To me and the research staff and to everyone at the CAB, it sounds like a blip within the statistical expectations of the protocol. To the public, all they hear is that the vaccine caused people to get HIV. The meeting is to explain to people what happened. I do not expect a big turnout. The people who were actually in the study have been calm and informed, but it’s the media that is having a fit.