The American virologist who co-discovered the AIDS virus has expressed confidence that a vaccine will be developed which will prevent the disease. However, he cautioned that it would be at least six years before such a vaccine was fully developed.
Dr Robert Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology Medical Biotechnology Centre, at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, said: "I have never felt better about the possibilities for success with a preventive vaccine than I have this past year as the research has progressed from different parts of the world."
Dr Gallo was speaking at University College Cork.
"Yet I would not want to be on the record as saying that I'm sure we'll have a preventive vaccine in X number of years, only that I feel significantly more positive," said Dr Gallo, whose autobiography, Virus Hunting, became a best-seller.
"To prove that a vaccine will work will take somewhere between six and 10 years. There are a lot of candidate vaccines", he added.
Dr Gallo said he believed that researchers now knew more about AIDS than about any other human disease. AIDS infects some 16,000 new victims a day, and it is estimated that there will be 50 million sufferers worldwide by 2000.
"An enormous amount of progress has been made, an enormous amount of knowledge is available. I don't know for sure, [but] it's possible that we have adequate information now to solve the whole thing. It's a matter of time and trial and error."
While the AIDS epidemic was non-predictable and dynamic and there were many variants, AIDS was unlikely to become capable of transmission other than through unprotected sex and intravenous drug use, he said.
In the Third World, a simple vaccination method which did not require frequent dosage was needed, Dr Gallo said.
"We've got to have therapies that are simpler and logistically feasible," he said, adding that the more complex treatments favoured in the US and Europe needed to be properly administered and followed through.
"[Otherwise] what we get is multi-drug resistant mutants, as happened in Baltimore, where in some of the poorer black areas, due not only to drug use but to young heterosexual transmission, 5 per cent, 6 per cent, 7 per cent of people are infected," he said.
"Can you imagine somebody in the Third World taking 40 to 50 pills a day, needing monitoring carefully for their bone marrow, and having to take them lifelong? We have to develop something that is injectable and needs be taken once in a long while."
Dr Gallo was speaking before delivering the first in a series of public lectures running all this week to mark the 150th anniversary of students enrolling at the university.
Other speakers include Dr William Welch and his wife, Dr Jill Cornell Tarter, who will speak on the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence; and a communications expert, Prof Andy Hopper, who will speak on progress in the communications industry.