Ho and others have proposed that antiretroviral regimens containing five or more drugs might suppress HIV more rapidly and completely, thereby improving the likelihood of viral eradication. While this approach may speed up the rate at which HIV replication declines, it has not proven successful in completely eliminating the virus from the body.

Some researchers have suggested that treatment during the first few weeks of HIV infection - known as primary or acute infection - might enable virus eradication. This thinking is based on the fact that newly infected people usually have less diverse virus, strong immune responses, and their ‘sanctuary’ sites may not yet be infected.

Patients who start treatment very early seem to have lower levels of HIV genetic material in latent CD4 T-cells ^[1]. In a recent study of seven patients who started antiretroviral therapy an average of seven months after seroconversion and stayed on treatment for an average of about three years, Fauci’s group found that the reservoi’r of resting HIV-infected CD4 cells decreased by 50% every five months^[2]. This led them to estimate that the pool of latent infected cells could potentially be eliminated in about eight years.

Other experts remain sceptical, since no patients so far - including those treated during seroconversion itself - are known to have completely eradicated HIV, and having even a very small number of remaining infected cells could be enough to ‘reignite’ active virus.