FALSE HEADLINE: This modified ARV drug is not a vaccine against HIV
A Facebook post claiming that Professor Benson Edagwa, a Kenyan scientist based in the United States has discovered a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has a false headline.
The article gets a number of key things right, including the fact that the new drug is not a cure for HIV, but its headline states that the discovery is a vaccine, which would require an immune response against the disease.
However, Professor Edagwa’s discovery has led to the development of an antiretroviral (ARV) drug that can provide protection against HIV for a year, which would eliminate the need for a daily ARV dose as is currently the case. The drug can also prevent viral transmission, but does not treat HIV.
A statement from the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Neuroscience at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) where Dr Edagwa is an assistant professor, indicates that the new drug could function as a ‘vaccine mimetic’, protecting the body against HIV infection for an extended time period of time.
The details of their study were published on April 27, in Nature Materials, a peer-reviewed biomedical research journal.
Changing the current administration of ARVs to one injectable dose per year to control the disease could help to overcome the risk of missing daily ARV treatment, which is a major healthcare concern, given the potential of the virus to rebound and negatively impact the overall health of a HIV-positive individual.
PesaCheck has looked into the an article with a headline claiming that a that US-based Kenyan scientist has unveiled the world’s first yearlong antiretroviral (ARV) for prevention of HIV and finds it to have a FALSE HEADLINE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck Managing Editor Eric Mugendi.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.