For those of us living with HIV one of the ongoing concerns is picking up new infections. Vaccines can help with this, but for many infections we know that vaccines simply aren't as effective on us as the general population. The data, published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, studied 50 matched pairs of HIV+ and HIV- women born before 1971 who, as children, had been vaccinated for smallpox. The findings showed that whilst 20% of the HIV-negative women reached the target threshold for CD4 T-cell response to the virus, only 2.4% of the HIV-positive women reached the same target.