'Breakthrough in AIDS vaccine unlikely in near future'

Australian Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty feels that there is no scope of discovery of a vaccine till 2015 that can completely cure HIV / AIDS.

"Even if there is a breakthrough, it will only be partial", he told mediapersons here on Friday.

Keeping this in view, Doherty, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine in 1996 with Swiss colleague Rolf Zinkernagel, emphasised the need for a public policy that was aimed at prevention of HIV / AIDS through spread of awareness among the people.

Earlier, delivering the third Burnet Lecture on "Plagues, Pestilences and Influenza" at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics here, he said that 30 new diseases have been transmitted to people since 1979.

This was on account of the rise in human population and increasing movement of people into forest areas.