The findings of a Vancouver-based researcher is creating serious buzz at the International AIDS conference in Mexico City.

Dr. Julio Montaner and his team from the BC Centre for excellence in HIV/AIDS at St. Paul's Hospital are presenting a new study that they believe can drastically eliminate the transmission of HIV.

Montaner studied more than three thousand HIV positive patients over 10 years.

They all received highly active antiretroviral therapy or HAART -- the HIV cocktail which helps control the virus. What they found has caught the attention of the international medical community.

"If we were to expand treatment to have as nearly as possible 100 percent coverage..we would be able to see that these people don't go ahead to die, they lead a normal life, they're free of disease, they don't plug up by our medical system...and equally important, we can prevent new HIV infections," says Dr. Montaner.

The data shows the aggressive strategy could cut the spread of the HIV virus by up to 60 percent. It also contradicts a widespread concern that drug abusers can't stick to treatment.

"Our study essentially looked at comparing the rates of survival among injection drug users and non injection drug users and we were actually quite surprised to find that the survival rates between these two populations at least in BC are very similar," says Dr. Evan Wood, one of the study's co-authors.

In B.C., between 12,000 and 15,000 people are HIV positive. One-third live in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, which has the highest HIV infection rate in the western world. And treating those people is a complex problem.

"It gets at the issue of how can we deliver HIV treatment to injection drug users, how can we reach people that are essentially living on the margins of our society as it is?" says Dr. Wood.

While HAART therapy is free to everyone in British Columbia, the government has announced as early as this fall it will become the first in the world to adopt an aggressive strategy to treat all those in need.

The study findings are published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

With a report by CTV British Columbia's Dr. Rhonda Low.