It is great to see U.S. dollars successfully at work.

The first AIDS vaccine approved for testing by the U.S Food and Drug Administration might be able to immunize people against AIDS who are in the early stages of infection with the human immunodeficiency virus.

Although the results are new and the vaccine was only tested in 14 volunteers, the findings present a ray of hope that the vaccine will be able to prolong the lives of AIDS victims, or even cure them. The Army, who has been conducting the tests thus far, plans to further investigate these possibilities in January.

The knowledge gained from these tests were obviously worth the time and money that have been put in by the researchers, even though some people opposed the funding needed to help develop an effective AIDS vaccine.

“People said you couldn’t stimulate a new immune response against the HIV (AIDS) virus,” Robert Redfield of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Bethesda, Md., said to the Chicago Tribune. “What we’ve shown, and what we’re excited about, is that that’s not true.”

Well, the results of the preliminary vaccine testing alone show that approving the the drug for testing was a good move by the FDA. Maybe this vaccine won’t be the cure, but it sure brings us a lot closer to finding one.