As medical professionals gathered in Mexico City for the 17th annual AIDS conference Sunday, Hans Jaeger told Deutsche Welle in an interview research has enabled medicine to move from not being able to treat the syndrome in the 1980s to making it "more treatable" in the '90s.

"Our next goal is a cure -- the medical word for it would be eradication," Jaeger told the German broadcaster. "That means having the ability to remove the virus from the body or to suppress it to the point where it can no long do any damage."

Jaeger said he thinks the goal is achievable "because the progress we are making against (human immunodeficiency virus) is much larger than in other comparable serious diseases. At the moment we have medicines that are better than ever at treating patients and possibly even healing them."

Jaeger said new drugs are doing a better job of suppressing HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

"When we look at the progress of the last four to six years and use it to extrapolate the future then we can imagine a cure," he said. "At the moment it's only a small step away."