Can we totally get rid of AIDS, keeping in mind humans would take a risk atleast once with new partners ?

Answer 1

Eliminating HIV, or curing it or making a vaccine, will be a hugely difficult task.

HIV is a very difficult target, because it mutates -- that is, changes its genetic code -- at an amazingly high rate. In fact, every single person with HIV has a different strain or set of strains of the virus. This is because HIV is a retrovirus, which contains RNA instead of DNA. To infect a cell, the RNA must be copied into DNA by an enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT). RT is a very sloppy copying process; it makes a mistake in roughly 1 in 2000 base pairs. In contrast, DNA copying through DNA polymerase (which has error correction) can copy millions and millions of base pairs without a single error.

This tremendously high error rate sounds like a recipe for disaster for the virus, and in fact I'm sure it leads to the creation of a lot of "dud" copies of the virus that do nothing. But it means that, from one generation to the next, if the mutations are not fatal to the virus, then it will be sufficiently different so as to evade detection. It also develops drug resistance very, very quickly this way unless drugs are combined to keep it "fenced in".

So RT is a potent weapon in HIV's arsenal, but it's also a point of control for HIV infections. Since it has no error correction, drugs that look *almost* like nucleotides (base pairs in DNA), can be used. These molecules have critical changes in them so the resulting DNA breaks up as soon as it's assembled. DNA polymerase recognizes that these are not valid nucleotides and replaces them for legitimate cell activity. Those drugs are called "nucleotide reverse transcriptase inhibitors". They are effective at controlling HIV infection when used in combinations of three or more, but they are not cures.

Answer 2

Since measles, a disease which could be eliminated by vaccination, kills nearly a million people a year worldwide, mostly children, I'm not gonna hold my breath!

Could we? Sure, eventually we are likely to find an effective vaccine. It's a pretty tricky virus, because of the types of cells it attacks, and its mutation rate, but eventually we could probably figure it out.

Will we? I guess, to some degree, that is up to you and me. How we vote, what kinds of letters we write, and to whom, where we donate time or money, these things matter.

Answer 3

This will most likely only happen if we make a vaccine. The latency time is too long for prevention, alone, to get the job done. The highest levels of HIV are in poor countries where people just don't care.