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Current combination antiretroviral therapies (ARV) are widely used to treat HIV. However drug-resistant strains of HIV have quickly evolved, and the level of risky behaviour has increased in certain communities. Hence, currently the overall impact that ARV will have on HIV epidemics remains unclear. We have used a mathematical model to predict whether the current therapies: are reducing the severity of HIV epidemics, and could even lead to eradication of a high prevalence (30%) epidemic. We quantified the epidemic level impact of ARV on reducing epidemic severity by deriving the basic reproduction number (R₀ ^ARV). R₀ ^ARV specifies the average number of new infections that one HIV case generates during his lifetime when ARV is available and ARV-resistant strains can evolve and be transmitted; if R₀ ^ARV is less than one epidemic eradication is possible. We estimated for the HIV epidemic in the San …