NSW Health Minister Jillian Skinner has urged gay men to get tested for HIV and take control of their health.
Speaking to SBS on World AIDS Day, she said the message of "taking control" was important.
"It's really significant that people do take control of their own health," she said.
"Particularly this high-risk community: men who have sex with men.
"Get tested. Know your HIV status. Take control of your drug treatments because treatment is a prevention."
Watch the full interview below:
Cure for AIDS within reach, researchers say
December 1st marks World AIDS day and researchers say the eradication of AIDS is now just a matter of time.
Scientists at the AIDS Institute at the University of Miami said 25 years of research had seen leaps and bounds in the search for a cure for the virus.
Scientist at the Institute were hard at work dissecting the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, in an effort to find ways to kill it.
They were now trying to replicate the success of a new treatment which saw the virus eradicated in a patient in Germany.
Timothy Brown, also known as the Berlin Patient, became HIV negative after receiving a mutated gene that blocked the virus from reproducing in his body after a bone marrow transplant.
AIDS Institute Director, Mario Stevenson, said they wanted to find a viable way to deliver that same mutated gene that cured the Berlin patient into others.
"The basic science efforts that many of us have been engaged in have started to reveal what the ingredients of a cure would like, what the obstacles to a cure look like, and what a success story might look like," Professor Stevenson said.
He said although they couldn't use bone marrow transplant to eradicate HIV, the case from Germany had given cluse on how to approach a cure strategy.
"It's given us a better understanding of what the virus is doing in the body of individuals who are on therapy, and it has given us the sort of obstacles that we need to overcome in order to eradicate the virus." Professor Stevenson said.
There were more than 35 million people globally with HIV/AIDS with millions more being infected every year.
The vast majority of infected people live in Africa, according to the World Health Organization.
