It's a combination of two drugs that have shown such promise in early experiments in monkeys that officials just expanded tests of them in people around the world.

Condoms and counseling alone have not been enough -- HIV spreads to 10 people every minute, 5 million every year. A vaccine remains the best hope but none is in sight.

If larger tests show the drugs work, they could be given to people at highest risk of HIV -- from gay men in American cities to women in Africa who catch the virus from their partners.

"As much as I want to make the right choices all of the time, that's not the reality of it," he said of practicing safe sex. "If I thought there was a fallback parachute, a preventative, I would definitely want to add that."

"I've had people make comments to me, 'Aren't you just making the world safer for unsafe sex?'" said Dr. Lynn Paxton, team leader for the project at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The drugs would only be given to people along with counseling and condoms, and regular testing to make sure they haven't become infected. Health officials also think the strategy has potential for more people than just gay men, though they don't intend to give it "to housewives in Peoria," as Paxton puts it.

Some uninfected gay men already are getting the drugs from friends with AIDS or doctors willing to prescribe them to patients who admit not using condoms. This kind of use could lead to drug resistance and is one reason officials are rushing to expand studies.

"We need information about whether this approach is safe and effective" before recommending it, said Dr. Susan Buchbinder, who leads one study in San Francisco.

The drugs are tenofovir (Viread) and emtricitabine, or FTC (Emtriva), sold in combination as Truvada by Gilead Sciences Inc., a California company best known for inventing Tamiflu, a drug showing promise against bird flu.

Unlike vaccines, which work through the immune system -- the very thing HIV destroys -- AIDS drugs simply keep the virus from reproducing. They already are used to prevent infection in health care workers accidentally exposed to HIV, and in babies whose pregnant mothers receive them.

Specifically, six macaques were given the drugs and then challenged with a deadly combination of monkey and human AIDS viruses, administered in rectal doses to imitate how the germ spreads in gay men.

Despite 14 weekly blasts of the virus, none of the monkeys became infected. All but one of another group of monkeys that didn't get the drugs did, typically after two exposures.

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