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The Food and Drug Administration has given a California company approval to conduct the world's first full-scale test of a vaccine to prevent infection with the virus that causes AIDS, the company announced Wednesday. The announcement brought expressions of cautious hope among health officials and advocates for people with AIDS. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has infected an estimated 30 million people in the world, and many experts say it will take a vaccine to stop the worsening epidemic. Scientists are divided over which experimental vaccines to approve for full-scale testing and when to do so. No vaccine is 100 percent effective. Some experts favor testing any promising vaccine, even if it is likely to protect only a small proportion of recipients, saying that something is better than nothing in a health emergency

The Food and Drug Administration has given a California company approval to conduct the world's first full-scale test of a vaccine to prevent infection with the AIDS virus, the company announced Wednesday. The announcement brought expressions of cautious hope among health officials and advocates for people with AIDS. HIV, the AIDS virus, has infected an estimated 30 million people in the world, and many experts say it will take a vaccine to stop the worsening epidemic. But scientists are sharply divided over when and which experimental vaccines to approve for full-scale testing. No vaccine is 100 percent effective. Some experts favor testing any promising vaccine, even if it is likely to protect only a small proportion of recipients, arguing that something is better than nothing in a health emergency

A new study has found a substantial discrepancy between the number of cancers detected during life and those found in autopsies. Despite advances in medical technology, the disparity between the diagnosis of cancer before and after death was 44 percent, similar to that found in studies conducted in earlier decades, said the authors. The study, which involved 1,105 autopsies performed over the 10-year period from 1986 to 1995 at the Medical Center of Louisiana in New Orleans, found that 100 patients had developed 111 cancers that doctors had either not detected or misdiagnosed. In 54 of the 100 patients, the cancer had spread. In 57 of the patients, the cancer was the most probable cause of death, the authors reported yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Long known as Charity Hospital, the Medical Center of Louisiana serves a mainly indigent population, which may not be receiving adequate health care. The hospital is also a top-level trauma center. Thus, cancers and other chronic conditions could have been masked by other more acute problems, Dr. Elizabeth C. Burton and her co-authors wrote. One in five of the deceased, who were age 4 to 92 years, had cancers at the time of autopsy. But the report did not address the extent of medical care they received in life

The Food and Drug Administration has given approval to a Bay area company to conduct the world's first full-scale test of a vaccine to prevent infection with the AIDS virus, the company announced Wednesday. The announcement brought expressions of cautious hope among health officials and advocates for people with AIDS. HIV, the AIDS virus, has infected an estimated 30 million people in the world, and many experts say it will take a vaccine to stop the worsening epidemic. But scientists are sharply divided over when and which experimental vaccines to approve for full-scale testing. No vaccine is 100 percent effective. Some experts favor testing any promising vaccine, even if it is likely to protect only a small proportion of recipients, arguing that something is better than nothing in a health emergency

The Food and Drug Administration has given a California company approval to conduct the world's first full-scale test of a vaccine to prevent infection with the AIDS virus, the company announced Wednesday. The experiment is to involve 5,000 uninfected individuals in up to 40 clinics in the United States and Canada and 2,500 volunteers in 16 clinics in Thailand over the next four years, the company, VaxGen Inc. of South San Francisco, said. The announcement brought expressions of cautious hope among health officials and advocates for people with AIDS. HIV, the AIDS virus, has infected an estimated 30 million people in the world, and many experts say it will take a vaccine to stop the worsening epidemic

The Food and Drug Administration has given a California company approval to conduct the world's first full-scale test of a vaccine to prevent infection by the virus that causes AIDS, the company announced on Wednesday. Florida will almost surely be chosen as one of the sites where the vaccine will be tested, VaxGen spokeswoman Nicole Lynch said. South Florida, with its diverse mix of AIDS patients, is a prime location, she said. The announcement brought expressions of cautious hope among health officials and advocates for people with AIDS. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has infected an estimated 30 million people in the world, and many experts say it will take a vaccine to stop the worsening epidemic

The Food and Drug Administration has given a California company approval to conduct the world's first full-scale test of a vaccine to prevent infection with the AIDS virus, the company announced Wednesday. The experiment is to involve 5,000 uninfected individuals in as many as 40 clinics in the United States and Canada and 2,500 volunteers in 16 clinics in Thailand during the next four years, VaxGen Inc. said. The South San Francisco company said it expects to receive approval from Thai health officials to begin testing in that country later this year. The VaxGen vaccine was safe in earlier tests involving 1,200 volunteers beginning in March 1992 and induced antibodies in more than 99 percent of the vaccinated participants, the company said. The question the new tests aim to answer is how effective the experimental vaccine will be among people who are exposed to HIV because of high-risk sexual practices or from injecting drugs

Forty years ago this month, Mr. (Arne H. W.) Larsson, now 83, became the world's first recipient of an implanted cardiac pacemaker, a battery powered device that electrically stimulated and regulated his dangerous heart rhythms. Since then, Mr. Larsson has undergone 25 operations and procedures to replace pacemakers that failed for one reason or another. Over those four decades, pacemakers have become smaller, smarter, safer, more durable and versatile. And implanting the device no longer requires chest surgery. I met Mr. Larsson and his wife, Else-Marie, in 1973, when he came for a checkup at a hospital in Stockholm and I renewed their acquaintance during their recent visit to New York. Mr. Larsson, who looks much the same, has sold his engineering business yet remains active and often strolls along Stockholm's rocky shore. As a frequent traveler, he often speaks out about how pacemaker users can lead normal lives. ''I forget I have a pacemaker,'' he said. Dr. (Ake) Senning and Dr. (Rune) Elmquist rigged a device about the size of a thin hockey puck, and Dr. Senning cut open Mr. Larsson's chest to implant it. Eight hours later, it failed. In the middle of the night, Mr. Larsson went back to the operating room where Dr. Senning put in the only backup. The batteries had to be recharged every few hours, but the pacemaker worked, on and off, for three years. ''He was lucky that he had few attacks when the pacemaker didn't work,'' Dr. Olof K. Edhag, a pacemaker expert who was one of Mr. Larsson's doctors, said in a recent interview in Stockholm

NASA had rated the melatonin experiment as one of the two top priorities in the human studies aboard Mr. (John) Glenn's shuttle flight. Mr. Glenn wi ll still participate in two other planned experiments -- monitoring sleep and use of protein -- that focus on studying similarities between aging on Earth and flying weightless in space. Sleep disorders are a particular problem among the elderly and astronauts, who in adjusting to the 90 minute day-night cycles in space often take sleeping pills and sometimes stimulants. The experiments have been cited as the principal reasons Mr. Glenn is going into space for the second time. In 1962, Mr. Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, and aboard Discovery he will become the oldest person to fly in space. Mr. Glenn, an Ohio Democrat, won his seat on the shuttle flight by lobbying NASA for two years to fly as a human guinea pig for geriatric studies. Dr. John B. Charles, an official at Johnson Space Center in Houston who helps coordinate the human studies aboard the Discovery, said that in his studies, Dr. (Charles A.) Czeisler had put ''strict requirements that don't apply to people who buy melatonin off the shelf in health food stores.'' Once Dr. Czeisler's team recognized a problem, NASA decided ''the best thing was to eliminate the melatonin aspect of the experiment and continue with the circadian rhythm aspects of the study'' that are ''at least as important as the melatonin study,'' Dr. Charles said