The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and its companion disease autoimmune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) has continually ravaged the entire world since its’ appearance in the Eighties.

To be diagnosed with it is not only a potential death sentence, but a terrible stigma as well, since the disease’s first human origins were in drug addicts that used needles and gay men, and in the early days the disease was thought to be exclusive to them.

Worse yet is the fear that patients must feel from those who know their condition, who, despite their best attempts to pretend otherwise, likely see them as a finger of death waiting to touch them.

The United Nations estimated that in 2011, 34 million people were living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, 2.5 million people were newly infected and 1.7 million people have died due to the disease. We’ve managed to hold it in check with special medicine, but all the while, any hope of a cure seemed so far out of reach as to be laughable.

I say “seemed”, because of a recent development.

A baby in Mississippi who had an HIV infection was “functionally cured” through the quick and heavy use of drugs shortly after the child’s birth, an unconventional technique that has never been used before.

Immediately after the news broke, the media pounced on it, and the incident is the first ray of light to HIV patients in years.

But I personally wouldn’t get too excited just yet.

This is good news, but it may not be the end of HIV quite yet, so people should not get tied up in false hope. A full cure is likely still years in the making, barring some other miracle. We should wait calmly and see what scientists and doctors discover in these findings.

Plus, “functionally cured”, according to researchers, is not the same as actually cured. In fact, it is more like recession.

Other researchers are questioning whether the child was even infected to begin with, which would have just made the aggressive treatment another method of common prevention due to babies born of infected mothers.

This is not the first instance of someone being cured of HIV either.

Timothy Brown, aka the “Berlin patient”, was stricken with a vicious double whammy, HIV and leukemia. However, he received a bone marrow transplant from an HIV resistant donor, and a year after the treatment, no traces of HIV were found in him. This was even more surprising, because at that time it was thought HIV was impossible to cure.

We can take a minute to celebrate, because at least one life on this earth has potentially been freed of a vicious virus. But at the same time, let’s temper it with logic and patience for a cure for everyone.