PARIS, Oct 27 (AFP) - The latest drugs cocktails can suppress but not eliminate the AIDS virus, which "hides" in the body only to return to the attack as soon as treatment stops, a top researcher warned.

Anthony Fauci, of the US National Institutes of Health, dashed optimism that the latest treatment could eradicate AIDS from the body, in a contribution to a three-day seminar on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome that ended here Wednesday.

"The answer is 'No'," he said bluntly. "Many studies of patients receiving combination drug therapy show that the virus reappears when treatment is discontinued."

Evidence for this came from a trial involving 18 HIV patients treated with the cocktail, called highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART).

Twelve of the patients were also given an immune stimulator, interleukin-2 (IL2), he said.

Tests of their blood and lymph nodes showed that the patients were apparently virus-free.

But in all but one of the cases, HIV-infected cells began to swarm through their bodies only two or three weeks after treatment was stopped.

Fauci said he believed the viral reservoirs were established in the early stages of infection, that they had substantial longevity and were a breeding ground for infection of CD4+ white blood cell.

"The recognition of viral reservoirs...makes the long-term control or functional eradication of the virus unlikely with currently available therapies," he said.

"There is considerable interest in diminishing, containing or eliminating latently infected, resting CD4+ T cells, as well as other viral sanctuaries."

The hideaways could include the brain, gut-associated lymphoid tissue, bone marrow and genital organs, he suggested.

Fauci's research, conducted with four other scientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is also published in Thursday's edition of the British weekly Nature.

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