Lorry drivers' strike causes major snarl-ups in Italy
ROME, Sept 23 (AFP)
A strike by truck drivers was causing major bottlenecks in several parts of Italy on Tuesday, with even worse jams expected because the stoppage was set to continue until Friday, the organisers said.
The transport sector employers' association, Fita-Cna, called the strike from Monday to Friday to protest at government plans for their industry.
Trucking companies are up in arms at a government decision to rescind a tax break that was granted to compensate for high diesel fuel prices and a plan to bring in a new kind of drivers' license for commercial vehicle users.
Fita-Cna said 80 percent of the country's truckers took part in the first day of the protest. The government said that only 15 percent took part.
On Tuesdny years away," the quest is on to find a microbicide to provide protection during intercourse, said Mark Wainberg, director of McGill University's AIDS Centre in Montreal, Canada.
The right formula would deliver a body blow to AIDS, especially in Africa, where women are often coerced by their partners into having unprotected sex, he told the biggest conference on the African AIDS crisis.
The ideal microbicide would not require further metabolism, such as a chemical, to make it work; it would be stable inside and outside the vaginal cavity; and it would not require refrigeration, he said.
But the hunt for it has been hampered by scientific setbacks, by the wily shape-changing nature of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and by a chronic lack of interest from Big Pharma, he said.
Initially, scientists cast around for a microbicide that worked in "a non-specific way" against HIV -- tough compounds that not only destroyed HIV but other micro-organisms as well.
yme on the virus surface, preventing the virus from integrating its DNA with that of the immune cell.
Some of these, notably compounds called PMPA, UC781 and Calanolide A, have performed well in various tests using tissue cultures, macaque monkeys and mice that have been genetically modified to replicate the symptoms of AIDS.
Other possibilities are using these drugs with other compounds to attack multiple targets on the virus, such as a molecule like T-20, which blocks the virus before it attaches to a cell.
But there is still a long way to go before any of the candidate treatments gets out of the lab and into human trials, a three-phase process of testing for safety and effectiveness that can take years.
And even so, many uncertainties remain. Some microbicides may not ward of new, resistant forms of the fast-mutating virus.
And instead of acting as a barrier in the vaginal or anal wall, some microbicides could be absorbed into the bloodstream -- not enough to kill the virus, but enough to encourage it to mutate into a resistant form.
Wainberg said the frustrations of finding a microbicide almost exactly mirrored those of the search for an HIV vaccine.
Part of the problem, he said, was "we have not done a very good job in involving the major pharmaceutical companies of the world," which had little interesting in pursuing research for a product, sold in poor countries, that would yield little profit.
Just as in vaccines, a way had to be found by governments and agencies to provide a profit incentive for research, and leave it to donations to bring down the cost for poor countries when the product finally reaches the market, he said.