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Objective Maternal-to-child-transmission of HIV-1 infection remains a significant cause of HIV-1 infection despite successful prevention strategies. Testing protective HIV-1 vaccines remains a critical priority. The immunogenicity of ALVAC-HIV vCP1521 (ALVAC) in infants born to HIV-1-infected women in Uganda was evaluated in the first pediatric HIV-1 vaccine study in Africa. Design HIV Prevention Trials Network 027 was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase I trial to evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of ALVAC in 60 infants born to HIV-1-infected mothers with CD4 counts of >500 cells per microliter, which were randomized to the ALVAC vaccine or placebo. ALVAC-HIV vCP1521 is an attenuated recombinant canarypox virus expressing HIV-1 clade E env, clade B gag, and protease gene products. Methods Infants were vaccinated at birth and 4, 8, and 12 weeks of age with ALVAC or placebo. Cellular and humoral immune responses were evaluated using interferon-γ enzyme-linked immunosorbent spot, carboxyfluorescein diacetate succinimidyl ester proliferation, intracellular cytokine staining, and binding and neutralizing antibody assays. Fisher exact test was used to compare positive responses between the study arms. Results Low levels of antigen-specific CD4 and CD8 T-cell responses (intracellular cytokine assay) were detected at 24 months (CD4-6/36 vaccine vs. 1/9 placebo; CD8-5/36 vaccine vs. 0/9 placebo) of age. There was a nonsignificant trend toward higher cellular immune response rates in vaccine recipients compared with placebo. There were minimal binding antibody responses and no neutralizing antibodies detected. Conclusions HIV-1-exposed infants are capable of generating low levels of cellular immune responses to ALVAC vaccine, similar to responses seen in adults.

Despite infrastructure and capacity challenges in Africa, significant development has been made in the number of laboratories supporting immunological and safety studies required for large-scale HIV/AIDS vaccine or intervention trials. In Uganda, cohorts participating in HIV intervention trials are often recruited from rural areas. To avoid transporting samples from intervention trial areas over long distances (120 km) to central laboratories in Entebbe, we set up a standardized peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) processing laboratory at a field station in Masaka, southwest Uganda. The laboratory was well equipped and enrolled into the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) Quality Assurance (QA) program. Staff was trained in laboratory techniques and Good Clinical Laboratory Practice (GCLP). The laboratory received IAVI and GCLP accreditation in 2008. In this paper we describe the process and achievements of measures taken to overcome challenges, to build staff capacity, and to optimize the quality of the cells yielded. * PBMCs : peripheral blood mononuclear cells IAVI : International AIDS Vaccine Initiative QA : quality assurance GCLP : Good Clinical Laboratory Practice CTL : cytotoxic T lymphocytes Th : T helper UVRI : Uganda Virus Research Institute SOPs : standard operating procedures SPARTAC : short pulse anti-retroviral treatment at seroconversion S101 : sample 1, operator 1 S1O2 : sample 1, operator 2 S2O1 : sample 2, operator 1 S2O2 : sample 2, operator 2 ELISPOT : enzyme-linked immunosorbent spot CLS : Clinical Support laboratory DAIDS : division of AIDS

The mechanisms underlying the relatively slow progression of human immunodeficiency virus type 2 (HIV-2) compared with HIV-1 infection are undefined and could be a result of more effective immune responses. We used HIV-2 and HIV-1 IFN-γ enzyme-linked immunospot assays to evaluate CD8+ T cell responses in antiretroviral-naive HIV-2-('HIV-2+') and HIV-1-infected ('HIV-1+') individuals. Gag-specific responses were detected in the majority of HIV-2+ and HIV-1+ subjects. Overlapping gag peptide analysis indicated a significantly greater magnitude and breadth of responses in the HIV-1+ cohort, and this difference was attributable to low responses in HIV-2+ subjects with undetectable viral load (medians 2107 and 512 spot-forming units per 106 PBMC, respectively, p=0.007). We investigated the phenotype of viral epitope-specific CD8+ T cells identified with HLA-B53- and HLA-B58-peptide tetramers (8 HIV-2+, 11 HIV-1+ subjects). HIV-2-specific CD8+ T cells were predominantly CD27+ CD45RA-, and only a minority expressed perforin. The limited breadth and low frequency of CD8+ T cell responses to HIV-2 gag in aviremic HIV-2+ subjects suggests that these responses reflect antigen load in plasma, as is the case in HIV-1 infection. Immune control of HIV-2 does not appear to be related to the frequency of perforin-expressing virus-specific CD8+ T cells. © 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH and Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Background: During the last decades, outbreaks of hand-footmouthdisease (HFMD)havebeen reported formany times inChina. The prevention and control of it has become an issue. Presently, there are no specific treatments and specific antiviral drugs or vaccines available against non-polio enteroviruses causingHFMD. That means the risk of infection only can be reduced by good hygiene practices and early medical attention for children with severe symptoms. Therefore, early detection and response using mathematical statistics method during the epidemics will be helpful for policy-makers to generate preventive strategies. Methods & Materials: We proposed a multiple seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average model, to forecast the expected incidence from April 2013 to September 2013 using the retrospective incidence from January 2008 to December 2012 as training set, and incidence from January 2013 to March 2013 as validation set obtained from China Information System for Disease Control and Prevention (CISDCP). All the procedures were implemented via SAS9.2 system. Results: After one order of regular differencing and one order of seasonal differencing, the transformed series achieved stationary. The best fitted model was SARIMAwith the lowest value of Bayesian Information Criterions (BIC). Model parameters had significant differences (P 0.05) (Table 2). This indicated that the best fitted model extracted the useful information of the series. Predictions and observations were very close to each other and showed a good forecasting performance. Conclusion: The ARIMA model we proposed can be an effective way to forecast the incidence cases of HFMD. Detecting the outbreaks before they happened is the key point of the early detection and early warning, and that is also the main purpose of our study. The usefulness of forecasting expected incidence of HFMD performs not only in giving public-health officials a probable trend of the variability to be expected in the future, but also in detecting outbreaks and providing probability statements and guidance to policy makers.

nant genome from the American continent, which exhibited a HBV/A2 DNA region (nucleotide positions 147–636 of the S gene) inserted in a backbone corresponding to HBV/D3. Hence, the aim of this study was to preliminary analyse the very early replication dynamics of the infection of this HBV D/A recombinant in comparison to its parental genotypes (HBV/D and HBV/A) and to a highly replicative genotype (HBV/C) in an in vitro experimental system. pUC19 plasmids deprived of promoters and carrying 1.24fold the HBV genome of HBV/A2, D3, C and D/A recombinant were constructed. Huh7 cells were transfected with these plasmids and transfection efficiency was monitored by using a pTARGET -GFP expression vector. At 24 and 72 h post-transfection (hpt), ALT/AST levels, viral load (COBAS TaqMan HBV Test, Roche), HBsAg and HBeAg (Abbott) were determined in supernatants. Cells were lysed at 72 hpt and the density of core associated-HBV DNA was compared by Southern blot hybridization. Except for Southern Blot, all experiments were conducted twice for each clone. Student’s t-test was used to compare the means and standard deviations between any pair of samples. A p value 0.05). Negative controls processed in parallel confirmed the specificity of the above mentioned results. Since this recombinant was obtained from an injecting drug user, these results imply an unprecedented call of singular relevance for the regional public health. Further in vivo studies are urgently needed to determine the pathogenicity of these replicative competent clones.

47 TESTING FOR HEPATITIS B VIRUS (HBV) ALONE DOES NOT INCREASE VACCINE COVERAGE IN NON-IMMUNIZED PERSONS J. Bottero, A. Boyd, J. Gozlan, M. Lemoine, A. Collignon, N. Boo, P. Dhotte, B. Varsat, C. Charlois, O. Cha, O. Picard, M.-D. Pauti, P. Campa, B. Silbermann, M. Bary, H. Rougier, P.-M. Girard, K. Lacombe. INSERM U 707, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Infectious Diseases, Virology Department, Hepatology Department, Hopital Saint Antoine, Laboratoire St Marcel, Direction de l’Action Sociale, de l’Enfance et de la Sante, CDAG du Figuier, Mairie de Paris, CPAM-CNAMTS, CDAG de Belleville, Mairie de Paris, Policlinique Baudelaire, Hopital Saint Antoine, Centre d’Accueil, de Soins et d’Orientation, Medecin du Monde, Unite de Consultation et de Soins Ambulatoires, Maison d’Arret de la Sante, Centre Croix Rouge du Moulin Joly, Paris, France E-mail: julie.bottero@sat.aphp.fr