In 2007, Wendo Aszed was in her twenties and enjoying life in Nakuru, a city in her native Kenya. One day, her best friend, someone Wendo said she “would die for,” told her he had just tested positive for HIV. Wendo immediately set out to find drugs that would keep him alive, but it was too late. He died within a month. Not long after, Wendo quit her job at a bank and dedicated her life to fighting AIDS and other deadly diseases.

The story of her friend is sadly common in low-income countries. Although the number of deaths from HIV/AIDS has dropped dramatically from its peak in the mid-2000s, the disease still kills 600,000 people and infects 1 million every year. But someday we will be able to make sure no one else suffers the same fate as Wendo’s friend. Thanks to recent scientific breakthroughs, for the first time ever we can realistically hope to end AIDS as a global threat.

To be clear, I’m not talking about eradicating HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. What I mean by “the end of AIDS” is that the vast majority of people with HIV will get medicine that keeps them from developing AIDS—and, eventually, will be able to get a cure for the disease—and that far fewer people will get the virus in the first place. By the late 2040s, we should be able to achieve a 90 percent drop in deaths and new infections compared with what they were in 2010.

The world won’t need to keep paying for treatment for tens of millions of people living with HIV. Low-income countries will be able to focus on fighting other diseases and investing in economic development. They will move faster toward self-sufficiency.