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A cure for AIDS - once only imaginable, is now within reach. That's the message coming out of Vancouver, where the world's top HIV researchers have gathered for the 11th International Conference on AIDS.

Basic research in to how HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, infects the human immune system has resulted in new drugs that effectively sabotage the biological machinery that the virus uses to replicate, and most of the excitement is over protease inhibitors. These drugs, when combined with other drugs called nucleoside analogues, have reduced the level of HIV infection to almost undetectable levels in patients during clinical trials.

U.S. minorities-who, as a group, tend to be poorer-are also disproportionally affected with HIV. Although they only account for 23% of the population, blacks and Hispanics accounted for 51% of American AIDS cases, and black men with an HIV infection are four times as likely to die than a white man infected with HIV.

Furthermore, the extremely-high price of the new drugs could put them out of reach to those with poor access to health care. Some have charged that pharmaceutical companies are unfairly profiting from HIV.

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