The 19th International AIDS Conference is set to be held in Washington D.C. on July 22-27, the first time in 22 years the United States will host the conference again.

It will be a historic event because the international community are at a turning point of their efforts to fight this epidemic, Diane Havlir, co-chair of the conference, told reporters here on Tuesday.

Over the past three years, there have been a series of breakthroughs in HIV field, which can reduce transmission by 96 percent and help curb new infections and deaths from AIDS significantly, Havlir said.

"I've been working in this field since the very beginning, we feel like we can declare that we are at the beginning of the end of the AIDS epidemic," said Havlir, a professor of University of California, San Francisco.

The theme of the conference is "Turning the Tide Together," and some 25,000 people are expected to attend the conference, said Havlir.

The International AIDS Conference is the largest gathering of professionals working in the field and people living with HIV. It plays a key role in shaping the global response to HIV and keeping the epidemic on the international agenda.

The first International AIDS Conference was held in Atlanta, U.S. in 1985, and it was held in San Francisco in 1990 again. The conference was supposed to be held two years later in Boston, but the global research community refused to return to the United States because of its travel ban on HIV positive people. The Obama Administration lifted the ban in 2009.

According to the World Health Organization, 34 million people are living with HIV/AIDS worldwide and 2.7 million new cases are reported each year.

VietNamNet/Xinhuanet