By The Associated Press
San Francisco/The Associated Press, Sunday, February 18, 2007 — It may be possible to battle AIDS into a low rate of infection, but it will take a long time and elimination of the disease seems unlikely, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said Saturday.
It's a disease transmitted by sexual activity, which is a fundamental component of human behavior, "so it isn't going to be easy to shut it off," Fauci said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A quarter-century after doctors first began recording cases of the illness, AIDS gets fewer headlines now that drugs are available to keep it in check in infected people, but the drugs don't eliminate the virus.
There are now 40,000 new infections in the United States each year with HIV — the virus that causes AIDS — and 4.3 million new infections around the world, he said.
Fauci, a longtime AIDS researcher and the government's point man on the disease, estimated that one in four Americans with HIV don't know they are infected.
Public fatigue in reading and hearing about AIDS can become a problem, he added, because "once you take it off the radar screen it's hard to get out the message of prevention."
It's important for infected people to get diagnosed and treated, he said, because people who know they have the disease are less likely to spread it to others. And while triple-drug treatment can't eliminate the disease, it can reduce the amount of virus in the system sharply, also helping prevent spread.
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